Investigating and Analyzing Simulation Tools of Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) serve as the backbone for the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities, enabling the gathering of essential data and vital information. The widespread deployment of sensors created new scenarios that presented new domains for various applications. Due to their numerous advantages, WSN's simulators are still gaining considerable attention as the primary method for testing and evaluating new protocols and approaches for WSN. The scientific community has developed various simulators, some tailored explicitly for WSNs and others for general use. In addition, an old but renovated direction has been enormously grown recently, representing the researcher's attention to building its own simulator. However, many researchers struggle to select the most appropriate tool for performance analysis, which requires extensive research into available options. Choosing a suitable simulator to meet the necessary simulation criteria necessitates exhaustive research into the available options. The published studies on WSN's simulators have limitations, such as the limited number of simulators under examination, ignoring the essential functions of the simulators, and inadequate performance criteria for precise comparison. To get beyond these restrictions in previous studies and offer a fresh study that compares the simulation tools comprehensively, an analysis of thirty-three different simulators was conducted based on a new taxonomy. Furthermore, this study examines the advantages and constraints of each simulator regarding many specific academic areas in WSNs. Moreover, the study presented a detailed comparison among the performance analysis tools according to many famous performance metrics.