Network/system co-simulation for design space exploration of IoT applications

With the growing complexity and scale of future Internet of Things (IoT) applications, there is a need for effectively exploring associated design spaces. IoT applications make use of inherently distributed processing. In such networks-of-systems (NoS), computation and communication is tightly coupled. Traditional design of networks and systems in isolation ignores how choices in one influence the other, and approaches for joint network/system co-exploration are lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel prototyping platform to enable comprehensive NoS design space exploration. Fast and accurate host-compiled system models are combined with a standard network simulator to provide a unified network/system co-simulation framework. Furthermore, detailed models of network interfaces and protocol stacks are integrated into host-compiled system and OS models to allow accurately capturing of network and system interactions. We apply our NoS simulator to two case studies from smart camera and healthcare application domains, and we demonstrate benefits and opportunities for exploration and optimization in network/system co-design. Results indicate that, depending on application, network and system configurations, application throughput can vary by an average of 26%, while device core utilization can vary by as much as 130%. These results confirm strong network and system interactions that could not be observed or optimized without novel co-simulation tools.