Considering the environment's characteristics in wireless networks simulations and emulations: case of popular Simulators and WSN

Wireless sensor networks are a low-power communication technology that is increasingly used in our daily life to realize various monitoring tasks in almost all domains. Therefore, WSN are getting much interest from scientific researches. Simulations and Emulations are used for evaluating new protocols and architectures. Such tools focus on analyzing higher-layer protocols and suppose that the physical layer models, particularly the radio propagation models, do not interfere with the experimentation. Therefore, the adopted radio propagation model has a great impact on the simulation/emulation results. In this paper, we study the consideration of the deployment environment in some popular simulators and emulators.