PPWSim: Privacy preserving wireless sensor network simulator
Niki Hrovatin, Aleksandar Tošić, Jernej Vičič · SoftwareX · 2022
The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a monitoring system consisting of a large number of wireless devices forming a multi-hop network without infrastructure. WSN nodes are generally cheap resource-constrained devices detecting environmental features using sensors. Although well-established communication protocols for Internet systems can provide reliable and secure communication between peers, applying similar solutions on WSNs could overwhelm the resource-constrained technology WSNs consist of. Moreover, the broadcast nature of wireless communication could reveal contextual information to external actors eavesdropping on RF signals. Therefore, it is of particular concern to research communication protocols designed explicitly for WSN to preserve network resources and privacy. In this paper, PPWSim is presented, a simulator developed to study a privacy-preserving communication protocol for edge data processing in WSNs. The simulator is based on the simulation environment nsnam NS3; therefore, it can be easily extended or used as a framework for developing other WSN simulators.