A comparative study on simulation vs. real time deployment in wireless sensor networks

Increasing deployment density and shrinking size of wireless sensor nodes requires small equipped battery size. This means emerging wireless sensor nodes must compete for efficient energy utilization. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play a vital role in energy consumption of sensor node as it controls the radio activities. Customized or open source simulators play an important role to measure the performance effectiveness of MAC protocols based on the fact that they are flexible, reduce experimental overhead and cost. Nevertheless, these benefits come at the cost of results accuracy. In this paper, we investigate differences of the behaviour of our agent based S-MAC protocols in real deployment compared to the results produced using our custom based simulator, which ignores the lower layers effects such as packet collision and overhearing. We use network simulator 2 (ns2), an open source simulator, which provides a complete protocol stack. We further try to find and explain the rationale of the variance of results produced by real deployment and that of simulators.