Modeling and simulation of networked low-power embedded systems: a taxonomy

Simulation has been widely adopted for the evaluation of novel protocols or other designs for networked low-power embedded systems, especially for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A large number of simulation tools have been developed for WSNs in the past few years. However, different tools may emphasize on different features. For example, general network simulators mainly focus on the high-level performance evaluation with certain assumptions, while some SystemC-based simulators have been developed recently to realize the hardware and software co-design of sensor node at the system level. Therefore, it is necessary to study the different modeling methodologies and to distinguish the various features of the existing WSN simulators. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that categorizes the existing simulation tools into four groups, i.e., network simulators with node models, network simulators with node emulators, node system simulator with network models, and node emulators with network models. To demonstrate the rationality and usability of the proposed taxonomy, we use it to conduct a survey of the existing simulation tools. This study is intended to be comprehensive to cover all important simulation tools.