Simulators are important tools for analyzing and evaluating different design options for wireless sensor networks (sensornets) and hence, have been intensively studied in the past decades. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. They cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance. As a result, the performance/energy benefits of customized hardware designs are difficult to be evaluated in sensornet research. To fill in this technical void, in this thesis, we describe the design and implementation of SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software cross-domain simulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware up to cycle-level accuracy through its seamless integration of three existing sensornet simulators: a network simulator TOSSIM, an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR and a hardware simulator GEZEL. SUNSHINE solves challenging design problems, including data exchanges and time synchronizations across different simulation domains and simulation accuracy levels. SUNSHINE also provides hardware specification scheme for simulating flexible and customized hardware designs. Several experiments are given to illustrate SUNSHINE's cross-domain simulation capability, demonstrating that SUNSHINE is an efficient tool for software-hardware codesign in sensornet research. / Master of Science

Simulators are important tools for wireless sensor network (sensornet) design and evaluation. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. Thus they cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance. To fill in the gap, we proposed SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software cross-domain simulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware through the integration of two modules: a network simulator TOSSIM [1] and hardware-software simulator P-Sim composed of an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR [2] and a hardware simulator GEZEL [3]. This thesis focuses on the integration of TOSSIM and P-Sim. It discusses the integration design considerations and explains how to address several integration challenges: time conversion, data conversion, and time synchronization. Some experiments are also given to demonstrate SUNSHINE's cross-domain simulation capability, showing SUNSHINE's strength by integrating simulators from different domains. / Master of Science