C-ERROR simulator for development for sensor and location aware sensing applications

Abstract

Distributed wireless sensor applications are useful for visualizing spatially and geographically related data such as location, neighborhood, weather, and measuring specific changes in the environment. Desires to augment these interfaces with additional specifications needed for distributed applications such as Power-Aware, Fault-tolerance and Processor agnostic deployment requirements have led to create a custom distributed Network Embedded Test-Bed that locally aggregate the measured signal from individual sensors and send it to a central coordinator for combined processing. We envision publishing and querying real-time (e.g. from sensors) over such distributed sensor farm applications which are deployed wirelessly and form a large sensor network. Existing solutions, although useful for writing the simple applications mentioned above, have several drawbacks in achieving this vision. First, publishing even a single stream of data as a useful service is a non-trivial task. Much useful data is not being stored yet because the need for managing a sensor farm has lots of complexities which make them unreliable in terms of polling time and communications costs. Second, existing applications are mutually incompatible and are processor centric and needs many ports which may introduce un-reliability. Third communication costs are not scalable to handle a sensor farm application and it does not provide an easy way to extend such a Network Embedded Test-Bed. The Network Embedded Test-Bed project aims to address these challenges, we like to model existing applications needs into a cross layer sensor network simulator called C-ERROR(Cross Layer Reusable Resource Optimized Routing) which allows different clustering algorithms to be integrated and measure its performance at each layer of the stack. To have a platform independent sensor OS and a scheduler which allows creating sensing tasks that have real-time constraints.