Hy-Sim: model based hybrid simulation framework for WSN application development

Bridging the physical world with the virtual one often broadens the possibilities of accelerating and easing embedded system design. This is even more true for WSNs, where generally the developed applications need to be tested and executed in hundreds to thousands of nodes. Often times, it is hard to manage test beds that have huge number of nodes. The most common solution is to rely on simulation frameworks that allow the developers to create virtual sensor nodes and then provides levels of abstraction to specify the applications which will be executed on the nodes. The foremost drawback of this kind of simulation is the absence of direct interfaces with the physical environment. Hence in this paper we propose a hybrid simulation framework for WSN application development that interconnects a virtual network with the physical network and then allows one to simulate the networks as a whole. Moreover, the developers model WSN applications by using high level abstractions which could be used for multi-platform automatic code generation (in TinyOS and Ember ZigBee platforms).