Research methods on development and validation of ad hoc and wireless sensor networks wsns

Abstract

The verification of theoretical analysis is a vital step to the development of an application or a protocol for wireless networks. Most of proposals are evaluated through mathematical analysis followed by either simulation or experimental validation campaigns. Up to this point, we provide a detailed description of the development process and limitations of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as well as analyze a large set of statistics on articles published (i.e. 674 papers in total) in Ad-Hoc and WSN related top representative conferences over the period 2008-2013 (i.e. ACM/IEEE IPSN, ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc and ACM SenSys). We mainly focus on the evaluation methodologies provided by researchers. More specifically, our goal is to explore the role of simulators and testbeds in the theoretical analysis of a scenario throughout the application development procedure.