An Openthread Simulation Framework for Wireless Sensor Network Evaluation

While the Internet of Things (IoT) demands robust protocols, verifying network behavior at scale presents a significant challenge. Physical hardware deployments are cost-prohibitive, time-consuming, slightly-adaptable and difficult to manage. To this purpose, several simulation environments have been developed, which take into consideration different aspect of the network i.e. physical layer, communication protocol, environmental conditions, etc. In this work, we are interested in investigate the behaviour of network based on OpenThread. Even if the existing official simulation environments OpenThread Network Simulator (OTNS) allows to simulate network based on the last release of the protocol, it lacks of native mechanisms for granular statistical data collection-specifically concerning per-packet energy consumption and automated experimentation. To bridge these operational gaps, this work introduces a software toolkit designed to automate experimental execution and quantitative metric extraction. The technical implementation utilizes containerization to ensure cross-platform reproducibility and environment stability, a custom network management abstraction to achieve easy control over network traffic generation, and the consolidation of fragmented resources into a unified technical reference to lower the barrier to entry for researchers. The toolkit's efficacy was validated by comparing two divergent topologies, demonstrating the ability to measure network reliability, temporal dynamics, and correlation between link layer RSSI and network layer stability.