Development and Evaluation of a High-Speed Simulator for Wireless Sensor Network Protocols using GPGPU

In this research, we propose a high-speed simulator for rapidly determining protocol performance of a sensor network comprised of many terminals. We have developed this simulator by using General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) technology, in which widely used Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are applied to general-purpose computing. This simulator executes at high-speed by using the parallelism that is a structural feature of GPUs, and enables simultaneous execution of simulations with various values of the parameters in the protocol. In order to determine the effectiveness of the proposed method, a simulator for a sensor network, in which communication follows a simple protocol with carrier sensing, was realized with a system using GPGPU. As a result, it was confirmed that a high speed 4.6 times faster than the case using an ordinary CPU can be achieved when the number of terminals is 1024. It was also confirmed that 100 simulations can be carried out at a speed about 60 times faster than the case where a single simulation is repeated using a CPU in which parameters are changed in a batch fashion.