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Software by Wei Ye

SCP-MAC is a new MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. One of its goals is to enable ultra-low duty cycle (0.1% and lower) operations and achieve better energy savings than existing MAC protocols. We have developed a radio communication stack on the Mica Motes running TinyOS . It is an alternative of the standard communication stack in the TinyOS release by UC Berkeley. It provides new features such as flexible packet format and headers, reliable transmission of variable length packets and the full S-MAC . This tool connects the Network Simulator, ns-2, with a robot simulator, Arena. Arena is a 2-D multiple robot simulator developed by Richard Vaughan, which has evolved as Stage now. The connection between ns-2 and Arena basically redirects all wireless communications among robots into ns-2. Within ns-2, different communication protocols and propagation models can be utilized to simulate the real communication system on robots. The integrated simulation enables us to: 1) study the performance of robot controllers under realistic communication environments; 2) study the performance of communication protocols when applied to a group of autonomous mobile robots. The following paper describes the integrated simulation in details.

Evaluating Control Strategies for Wireless-Networked Robots Using an Integrated Robot and Network Simulation (PDF)  (PS)
Wei Ye, Richard T. Vaughan, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin, and Maja J. Mataric
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2001) , Vol. 3, pp. 2941-2947, Seoul, Korea, May, 2001.

This tool has two parts: one in ns-2 and one in Arena. Since the author of Arena did not release Arena source code to public, I will only provide the source code of this tool in ns-2. Click here to download the tar ball. With the source code in ns-2 and the above paper, you should be able to figure out what needs to be done in Arena and robot controllers. Pleaese note that this work is based on ns-2.1b6.