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Evaluations of Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications demonstrate the significant and still existing gap between examinations with generic simulation environments and real-life (e.g., field test) or controlled (e.g., testbed) sensor network deployments in terms of realistic and accurate results. The separated use of single examination approaches is often not enough to overcome all evaluation challenges. We therefore propose a combination of discrete-event simulation, radio-channel emulation, and real hardware working together on different layers of the protocol stack of the system-under-test. Our combined approach reduces the gap between abstract simulations and network testbed experiments by providing adjustable radio conditions for repeatable evaluations of WSN and IoT networks.
Low-rate and low-power wireless communications are still the main drivers for innovative industrial automation and the Internet of Things (IoT). Physical mobility is one of the most important challenges for them. Common wireless technologies and protocols, e.g., WirelessHART and ISA100.11a Wireless for industrial process plants, ZigBee for building automation, or 6LoWPAN and 6TiSCH in context of the IoT, are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Event-based simulation is the method of choice for analyzing network protocols and algorithmic applications of such distributed sensor applications. Performance measurements and holistic evaluations, however, are greatly influenced by the underlying hardware resources, physical layer protocols, and radio channel conditions, which are usually not considered or highly abstracted in network simulations. In this paper we present SEmulate, a hybrid system for seamless (network) simulation and hardware-based emulation for wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol standard, which takes the hardware aspects into account by applying an Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) approach.