Towards an agent-based wireless sensor network simulator for hierarchical routing protocols

Nowadays, we are witnessing a proliferation of new technologies, which induce a radical change in our habits, our behavior and our way of living and thinking. Familiar objects become more and more intelligent and acquire more and more autonomy. We can consider that this intelligence of objects is much related to their interactions. Wireless communications between objects allow the exchange of information between remote objects. Wireless sensor networks are a major field for the sharing of information between remote objects. However, several technological, organizational and energy aspects must be considered within these networks. Thus, and during the last decades several researchers have looked into the implementation of protocols allowing the organization and management of these wireless networks. One of the points that most attracted the attention of these researchers concerns the saving of energy and its optimization in such a way as to ensure the maximum uptime of the network. Indeed, these networks have reduced energy resources that come from batteries that cannot be recharged when these sensor nodes are housed in hostile or unreachable places. The hardware and software resources are also minimal given the size of the sensor nodes and its energy reserve. Another aspect to consider concerns the distances for the transmission and the reception of the data between nodes. Other aspects related to sensor networks concern the security of information exchanges between sensor nodes and the quantity of information to be transmitted which must not saturate the network. With the aim of proposing new protocols for routing data between sensor nodes, which take into account all or part of the above-mentioned aspects, it is necessary to simulate their behavior and compare their results with those obtained using other existing protocols. To this end, there are several simulation platforms, some of which are open source and others proprietary. This article reviews several of these tools among those most used in the literature and then proposes the basic principles of a new tool for simulating routing protocols in a wireless sensor network based on multi-agent systems. The work presented in this paper focalizes on the simulation of the hierarchical protocols by help of the Agent Group Role concepts. In this scope, the organizational model AALAADIN is used to develop the semi-formal system model and the simulator is implemented by using the MADKIT platform.