Enabling Accurate, Energy-Aware, and Scalable Simulation of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are heavily utilized, for example, in industry, agriculture, forestry, and home automation. A WSN comprises several resource-constrained, tiny sensing devices - the sensor nodes. One of the most important properties of a WSN is the energy consumption, as in many applications the battery-powered nodes should achieve lifetimes of several years. Especially the timing of the firmware and hardware components has a major impact on the consumed energy. Evaluation of WSNs is a challenging task and simulation has shown to be the most cost-effective approach.   In this PhD thesis the novel STEAM-Sim simulator is presented. STEAM-Sim enables accurate, scalable, and energy-aware simulations of WSNs. The WSN is considered in the hardware, software, and network domain and therefore a corresponding hardware/software/network co-simulation is established. Running original firmware on abstract hardware models and including realistic channel models ensures accurate simulation. Choosing the appropriate level of abstraction and modeling methods supports efficient simulation. The powerfulness of STEAM-Sim was evaluated on a diverse set of use cases and results are presented accordingly.