Reducing WSN Simulation Runtime by using Multiple Simultaneous Instances

Abstract

WSN can be deployed using widely available hardware and software solutions. The Contiki is an open source operative system compatible with a wide range of WSN hardware. A Contiki development environment named InstantContiki is also available and includes the Cooja simulation tool, useful for the simulation of WSN scenarios, prior to their deployment. This simulation tool can provide realistic results since it uses the full Contiki's source code and some motes can be emulated at the hardware level. However, the Cooja simulator uses one process per simulation, not taking advantage of multiple core processors. In this paper we propose a framework to automate the execution of simulations of multiple scenarios and configurations in Cooja. When a multiple cores processor is available, this framework can run multiple simultaneous Cooja instances, taking advantage of processing resources and contributing to reduce the total simulation runtime.