J-Sim: a simulation environment for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained considerable attention in the past few years. As such, there has been an increasing need for defining and developing simulation frameworks for carrying out high-fidelity WSN simulation. In this paper, the authors presented a modeling and simulation framework for WSNs in J-Sim - an open-source, component-based compositional network simulation environment that is developed entirely in Java. This framework is built upon the autonomous component architecture (ACA) and the extensible internetworking framework (INET) of J-Sim, and provides an object-oriented definition of (i) target, sensor and sink nodes, (ii) sensor and wireless communication channels, and (iii) physical media such as seismic channels, mobility model and power model (both energy-producing and energy-consuming components). Application-specific models can be defined by sub-classing classes in the simulation framework and customizing their behaviors. The use of the proposed WSN simulation framework was demonstrated by implementing several well-known localization, geographic routing, and directed diffusion protocols. In addition, performance comparisons were performed (in terms of execution time incurred, and the memory used) in simulating several typical WSN scenarios in J-Sim and ns-2. The simulation study indicates that the proposed WSN simulation framework in J-Sim is much more scalable than ns-2 (especially in memory usage).