TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire tinyOS applications

Accurate and scalable simulation has historically been a key enabling factor for systems research. We present TOSSIM, a simulator for TinyOS wireless sensor networks. By exploiting the sensor network domain and TinyOS’s design, TOSSIM can capture network behavior at a high fidelity while scaling to thousands of nodes. By using a probabilistic bit error model for the network, TOSSIM remains simple and efficient, but expressive enough to capture a wide range of network interactions. Using TOSSIM, we have discovered several bugs in TinyOS, ranging from network bitlevel MAC interactions to queue overflows in an ad-hoc routing protocol. Through these and other evaluations, we show that detailed, scalable sensor network simulation is possible.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SENSYS
• Authors: Philip Levis, Nelson Lee, Matt Welsh, David E. Culler
• Keywords: Sensor Network, Sensor Network Domain, Sensor Networks, SENSYS 2003, TinyOS Wireless Sensor