Routing behavior across WSN simulators: The AODV case study

The continuous interest in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has led to the development of several applications, from traditional monitoring, to cooperative and distributed control and management systems, to automated industrial machinery and logistics. The design and optimization of specialized WSN platforms and communication protocols typically relies on simulation tools, which have been designed to explore and validate WSN systems before actual implementation and real world deployment. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and the accuracy of mainstream open source simulation tools for WSNs on a realistic multi-hop data passing benchmark which makes use of the Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) protocol. The simulation results are then compared against measurements on a physical prototype. Our experiments show that the tools produce equivalent and consistent results from a functional point of view. However, their ability to model details of the execution platform and of the communication channel may significantly impact the run-time simulation performance and the accuracy of the simulation results.