Towards Realistic and Credible Wireless Sensor Network Evaluation

This paper explores the problem of realistically evaluating Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, algorithms and protocols. It surveys the currently available techniques, such as simulators, testbeds and real world deployments and compares their properties and challenges. While the authors underline the significance of simulation tools, they also observe that the state of the art simulation models at all levels (from physical to application) still lack realistic behavior. To demonstrate this gap they performed a broad study of simulation models and real world behavior of wireless links and compared those in various settings, including outdoor environments and battery-based deployments.