ETSSI: Energy-based Task Scheduling Simulator for wireless sensor networks

Distributed processing has been a viable solution for enabling the next generation of real-time wireless sensor networks (WSN). Efficient task scheduling and allocation (TSA) policies guarantee that efficiency of the distribution. However, TSA policies in WSN face the challenges imposed by the wireless communication medium. This makes the accurate evaluation and verification of TSA policies difficult in live systems. Hence, developing a TSA simulator becomes essential to decrease the time for successful development and testing of relevant algorithms. This work addresses the need for a TSA simulator for WSN and develops ETSSI an Energy-based Task Scheduling Simulator. ETSSI is an event-driven, scalable, simulator which provides a user-friendly graphical interface. Its accuracy is more than 80% compared to in-door live implementations on a test bed of Telosb nodes. Most importantly, the TSA policy designer using ETSSI is only concerned about the application model, not the actual application implementation, which is mandatory in today´s WSN simulators.