A Hybrid Framework for Soft Real-Time WSN Simulation

The design of a wireless sensor network is a challenging task due to its intrinsically application-specific nature.Although a typical choice for testing such kind of networks requires devising ad-hoc testbeds, this is often impractical as it depends on expensive, and hard to maintain deployment of nodes. On the other hand, simulation is a valuable option, as long as the actual functioning conditions are reliably modeled, and carefully replicated.The present work describes a framework for supporting the user in early design and testing of a wireless sensor network with an augmented version of TOSSIM, the de-facto standard for simulators, that allows merging actual and virtual nodes seamlessly interacting with each other; the proposed tool does not require any special modification to the original simulation code, but it allows contemporary execution of code in actual, and virtual nodes, as well as simulation of nodes executing different application logics. The reported experimental results will also show how soft-real time constraints are guaranteed for the augmented simulation.