H-TOSSIM: Extending TOSSIM with Physical Nodes

Wenjun LI, Xiaobin ZHANG, Weihua TAN, Xiaocong ZHOU

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DOI: 10.4236/wsn.2009.14040                

Abstract

As the development of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), software testing for WSN-based applications be-comes more and more important. Simulation testing is an important approach to WSN-based software testing, and TOSSIM is the most widely used simulation testing tool targeted at TinyOS which is the most popular operating system nowadays. However, simulation testing tools such as TOSSIM can not reveal program er-rors about communication detail or timing, and lack accurate power consumption model and even can not support power consumption estimation. In this paper, a hybrid testbed H-TOSSIM is proposed, which ex-tends TOSSIM with physical nodes. H-TOSSIM uses three physical nodes, of which, one shares the simu-lated environment with all virtual nodes to test the WSN program, and the other two bridge the real world and the simulated environment. H-TOSSIM combines the advantages of both the simulation in physical node and the simulation testing tools in WSN software testing. Through experiments, we show that H-TOSSIM really reveals program errors which the pure simulation testing can not capture, and can support power con-sumption estimation for large WSN with high accuracy and low hardware cost.

Keywords

Wireless Sensor Network, Sink, Principal Node, Superior Node, Network Lifetime

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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