Enhanced Wsn Simulation Accuracy Through Novel Hardware In The Loop Approach

Recent advancements in ICT technologies foster the wide spread of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for a variety of applications. Such interest is accompanied by the development of appropriate tools to boost the performance and applicability of prominent WSN designs. In that context network simulators play a key role in designing, developing and evaluating respective solutions. However, in many cases, simulation environments are notorious for inadequate or low accuracy models, not able to capture the highly complex and dynamic behavior of a WSN environment. Driven by such shortcomings this paper focuses on Hardware in the Loop (HiL) enhancements of prominent WSN simulators able to yield significant reliability benefits. Specifically, the main contribution of this paper is the design, development and evaluation of novel HiL extensions regarding the widely used Castalia WSN simulation framework. Proposed HiL architecture is applied on top of the standard simulation environment facilitating easy integration. Evaluation experiments follow two diverse approaches. On one hand, experimental evaluation focuses on application layer of a node revealing the importance of accurate consideration of time delays caused by embedded hardware and which are ignored by pure simulations. On the other hand, the second approach focuses on the physical layer and the wireless transmission medium. In this context, it is presented that through the proposed HiL approach, most of the deficiencies introduced by simplified models are efficiently tackled.