Assessing Time Complexity of Applications for TinyOS-Mica Wireless Sensor Networks in TOSSIM Emulator

We propose an approach to assess and profile the time complexity of an wireless sensor network application executing in the TOSSIM environment since TOSSIM lacks the built-in facilities to determine the run time for an application that is intended for execution in parallel and distributed mode on real sensor network hardware. This procedure, which is conceived to estimate the time complexity in approximate terms, requires counting the number of timer periods needed to execute certain functionality of an application. Consequently, the length of a time interval associated with the sleep-wakeup periods for motes is used to approximate the time complexity of the application. We present the application of the proposed methodology for simulation of a wireless sensor network application in the TOSSIM environment.