Hardware-software co-simulation of self-organizing smart home networks: Who am I and where are the others?

In this paper, we present our solution to simulate home automation networks on a functional level in our research project on self-organizing home automation network nodes. We simulate the nodes with our hardware-software co-simulator, based on the virtual machine QEMU and the SystemC hardware simulator. The Virtual Distributed Ethernet suite is used to simulate several hardware-software co-simulators in a network. Furthermore, tools we developed to prepare network node disk images, configure the simulation environment, and generate Linux device drivers from hardware interface specifications are presented.