A scalable simulator for TinyOS applications

Large clouds of tiny devices capable of computation, communication and sensing, the goal of the Smart Dust project, will soon become a reality. Hardware miniaturization is shrinking devices and research in software is producing applications that allow devices to communicate and cooperate toward a common goal. Success on the software front hinges on the design of algorithms that can scale up with system size. Given that the number of individual cooperating devices will reach high orders of magnitude (hundreds of thousands or even millions), debugging and evaluating the software in such a large system can reap much benefit from simulation. This paper describes the design of a scalable and flexible simulator which allows for the direct execution, at source code level, of applications written for TinyOS, the operating system that executes on Smart Dust. This simulator also provides detailed models for radio signal propagation and node mobility.