A comparative study of recent wireless sensor network simulators

Over recent years, the continuous interest inwireless sensor networks(WSNs) has led to the appearanceof new modeling methods and simulation environments for WSN applications. A broad variety of differentsimulation tools have been designed to explore and validate WSN systems before actual implementation andreal-world deployment. These tools address different design aspects and offer various simulation abstractionsto represent and model real-world behavior. In this article, we present a comprehensive comparative study ofmainstream open-source simulation tools for WSNs. Two benchmark applications are designed to evaluatethe frameworks with respect to the simulation runtime performance, network throughput, communicationmedium modeling, packet reception rate, network latency, and power consumption estimation accuracy.Such metrics are also evaluated against measurements on physical prototypes. Our experiments show thatthe tools produce equivalent results from a functional point of view and capacity to model communicationphenomena, while the ability to model details of the execution platform significantly impacts the runtimesimulation performance and the power estimation accuracy. The benchmark applications are also madeavailable in the public domain for further studies.