Wireless sensors networks emulator implemented on a FPGA

The design, manufacture and deployment of embedded systems become increasingly complex and multidisciplinary process. Before the steps of manufacturing and deployment, a simulation and validation phase is necessary. Given the increasing complexity of systems, a specific simulation and validation process must take place. This simulation ideally made in a single development environment, should cover different areas and all components of the system. In this paper, we describe a wireless sensors network (WSN) emulator, implemented on a FPGA, describing some models as examples, how we can do multiple simulations when the device was configured and programmed once, and how we can retrieve results from the behavioral emulator. In side to legacy network simulator, for the testing and modeling of communication protocols, this simulator shouldn´t omit WSN specific aspect, in accuracy it covers the modeling of node platforms, protocols, and real world phenomena. The diversity of applications and the typically scarce node resources set very tight constraints to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). It is not possible to fulfill all requirements with a general purpose WSN, for which reason the rapid development of application specific WSNs is preferred. We present a new emulator for the design, simulation, and evaluation of WSNs, implemented on an very dense Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) exploring the parallelism and his resources to do a very rapid simulation of a WSN for long periods, and without overloading memory by the intermediate data.