Accurate Power-Aware Simulation of Wireless Sensor Networks Considering Real-Life Application Code

In this paper, we present a methodology to establish an accurate and power-aware simulation of wireless sensor networks. As the design of software applications running on resource-constrained sensor nodes mainly influences both timing and power consumption in the network, it is crucial to include these components in the simulation. Besides considering the software aspect in the network, it is also important to obtain a detailed and accurate power consumption profile of every hardware module present in the network. Our methodology extends the PAWiS framework, which builds upon the well known discrete event network simulator OMNeT++. The framework was extended to include natively executing real-life application code written in the C language. Using a time-annotation process brings the timing aspect of application code execution into the simulation, and therefore increases simulation accuracy. Moreover, the presented partitioning of the application code into software layers provides easy porting of the simulated code to real sensor nodes. This concept does not impose any restrictions with respect to the target platform used or the OS running on it. To demonstrate the functionality of this approach, the methodology was applied to a real-world networking test scenario, and the achieved simulation results were compared to real-world measurements. The performance of the simulation environment was evaluated and is presented.