Including Real-Life Application Code into Power Aware Network Simulation

We present a methodology and a toolset for power aware HW/SW co-simulation including real-life application code at network level. The toolset consists of the known OMNeT++ network simulation environment and the PAWiS framework, which was extended to include time-annotated and natively executing C code, and allows detailed analysis of the power consumption of single modules in the network. In conjunction with the support of interrupt handling, this especially addresses the needs of applications running on nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The presented partitioning of the application into platform-dependent and platform-independent SW layers provides easy porting of the simulated code to real sensor nodes. Therefore the established simulation environment supports the development, implementation and verification of energy optimized protocols for real-time industrial applications using WSNs. To demonstrate the functionality of this approach, the methodology was applied to a simple real-world networking test scenario and the achieved simulation results are compared to real-world measurements.