Estimation of energy consumption through parallel computing in wireless sensor networks

The lifetime of a wireless sensor network is the most important design parameter to take into account. Given the autonomous nature of the sensor nodes, this period is mainly related to their energy consumption. Hence, the high interest to evaluate through accurate and rapid simulations the energy consumption for this kind of networks. However, in the case of a network with several thousand nodes, the simulation can be very slow and even impossible. In this paper, we present a new model for computing the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks in parallel. The model uses discrete event simulation implemented on a massively parallel GPU architecture. The results show that the proposed model provides simulation times significantly shorter than those obtained with the sequential model for large networks and for long simulations. This improvement is even more significant if the processing on each node is very time consuming. Finally, the proposed model has been fully integrated and validated on the CupCarbon simulator.