Transaction-based modeling for large scale simulations of heterogeneous systems

This paper focuses on the simulation of heterogeneous systems, in terms of hardware and software, that contain thousands of various Embedded Control Units (ECUs) which communicate with each other throughout a network. Designers need to simulate ECU interactions to execute and validate the whole system since hardware and software have strong mutual dependencies. We propose a modeling approach based on a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) interface, which is the main programming constraint, to achieve fast simulations. Our simulator allows to perform early simulation of heterogeneous ECUs in a few seconds and scales up to thousands ECUs. Experimental results show that the simulation speed and the scalability are very similar to state of the art Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) simulators but our approach implies lesser constraints about programming language, and simulation kernel.