GCoL - A General Co-simulator Applied to Wireless Sensor Networks and RTL Design

Standard wireless sensor systems and IoT devices demand application-oriented designs due to severe power constraints. In this paper, we present GCoL, a framework that replaces traditional created virtual sensor nodes with a physical hardware description in a wireless sensor network simulation. It comprises a simple but efficient configuration script, scenario interface for deployment nodes and related graphical and data reports. The hardware-software co-simulation guarantees the accurate emulation of an embedded processor or algorithm. The overall power consumption and timing of intended application can be acquired through any traditional ASIC flow. The proposed system is capable of simulating dedicated hardware through a wireless sensor network environment designed with Matlab ® which provides suitable libraries for digital signal processing and control algorithm behavior simulation. Our framework is designed to be modular in order to easily integrate new components. The platform takes advantage of robustness communication toolboxes and graphical user interface of Matlab ® to aid users to develop, improve and better create specific hardware applications which will be later executed on the nodes.