LVWNet: an hybrid simulation architecture for wireless sensor networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is a reality right now and IoT applications has being applied for many different scenarios. Every IoT scenario has stringent requirements and each new developed application must be tested before being embedded on real devices. There are two main approaches for testing IoT applications, real testbeds and network simulators. Real testbeds are the most accurate test environments, although creating scenarios with a high density of devices or analyze complex wireless sensor networks data (e.g. mobility) can be very costly. Due to limitations of real testbeds, wireless networks simulators are the most used tool for testing new wireless applications. Despite of relying on mathematical models to simulate securely IoT scenarios, it increases the development effort by the need of implementing a different version of the application for testing purposes. Also, the available simulators lacks some important features for prototyping IoT applications. Thus, this work presents the Linux Virtual Wireless Network, a hybrid simulation environment for wireless networks that provides flexibility by virtualization of wireless nodes and topology of the network, also the possibility of connecting real devices to the virtual topology, creating a hybrid scenario that can be used to achieve better analysis and validation of IoT applications.