Parallel multi-level simulation of wireless sensor networks

Networks consisting of many autonomous sensors are gaining importance in real-life applications. Wireless sensor lifetimes still are limited by finite power sources, leading to the need of low-power system designs. A novel holistic approach for system simulation of ultra-low power wireless sensor networks is discussed. Special focus of this paper is parallel modeling of simulation components, adaptive synchronization, power profiling and framework integration. Detailed network power consumption simulation is achieved by not only simulating the sensor nodes- and their various components-themselves, but also the overall system consisting of multiple interacting elements such as a dynamic environment. The framework includes an instruction set simulation in order to enable accurate node simulation as well as extensive power profiling and tracking beyond node borders. The use of adaptive multi-threading leads to considerable hard- and software co-simulation speedup.