Improving the Performance of Distributed Simulations of Wireless Sensor Networks

Simulations are key to the design, implementation, and evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and their applications. To meet the demands for high simulation fidelity and speed, distributed simulation techniques are increasingly being used in WSN simulators. However, existing distributed WSN simulators only provide limited speedup and scalability because of the large overheads in preserving the causality of the interactions of wireless sensor nodes during distributed simulations. In this dissertation, the authors examine methods to improve the performance of distributed WSN simulators by controlling the overheads related to distributed simulations and parallelizing simulations.