Modeling and Simulation of Multihop Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

We present a simulation framework to investigate the energy efficiency of different routing protocols used in resource constrained wireless sensor networks. Our simulator is modular and provides a flexible tool to build diverse protocols by combining existing building blocks at different layers and to analyse how several factors such as routing strategies, MAC protocols, link and node failures, energy on path, network topology changes, in-network processing, scheduling at MAC layer and other adjustable configuration parameters influence the energy efficiency of these protocols. The simulator uses and extends the open source OMNeT++ and it provides a framework to rapidly develop, to experiment with and to evaluate efficiently routing protocols; the quantitative effort to design new routing protocols and to integrate them into a complete protocol stack is considerably reduced. We provide a flexible simulation framework that supports rapid prototyping, experiments with (through simulation) and evaluation tools.