Mixed-level simulation of wireless sensor networks

Networks consisting of many autonomous sensors are - thanks to various reasons - gaining importance in real-life applications. Most wireless sensor lifetimes are still limited by finite power sources leading to the need of low-power system designs. In this paper, a novel approach for system simulation of ultra-low power wireless sensor networks is proposed. To be able to estimate the power consumption of the whole network the simulation frame work must not only be capable of simulating the sensor nodes themselves, but also the overall system consisting of all interacting elements of the network - which can be much more sophisticated. The framework therefore includes an performant instruction set simulation in order to enable extensive power profiling and tracking. The hard and software co-simulation speedup gained is primarily achieved by multi-threading. As one of multiple example applications a tire pressure monitoring system from the automotive area is shown.