A plethora of (secure) routing protocols exists for wireless multihop networks. These protocols are mostly tailored to meet the performance and security requirements of specific application scenarios. As a result, the protocols cannot easily be adapted to novel application demands, organically growing networks, etc. We argue that the modular design of routing protocols and security mechanisms can remove the key limitations of today's monolithic routing protocols. We show the feasibility of a modular routing approach for wireless multihop networks using the example of a wireless mesh network. In particular, we demonstrate that a dynamic switch between protocol modules is possible at runtime by means of simulation as well as testbed experimentation. We further demonstrate that the security associations and the key material can be reutilized for bootstrapping novel protocol modules, thus minimizing the control overhead.

Nowadays, the development of embedded system hardware and related system software is mostly carried out using virtual platform environments. The high level of modeling detail (hardware elements are partially modeled in a cycle-accurate fashion) is required for many core design tasks. At the same time, the high computational complexity of virtual platforms caused by the detailed level of simulation hinders their application for modeling large networks of embedded systems. In this paper, we propose the integration of virtual platforms with network simulations, combining the accuracy of virtual platforms with the versatility and scalability of network simulation tools. Forming such a hybrid tool-chain facilitates the detailed analysis of embedded network systems and related important design aspects, such as resource effectiveness, prior to their actual deployment.

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A widespread methodology for performance analysis in the field of communication systems engineering is network simulation. While ns-2 has established itself as virtually the standard network simulation tool, other network simulators have gained more and more attention during the last years. In this paper, we briefly survey new developments in the field of network simulation and conduct a performance comparison study by implementing an identical simulation set-up in five simulators, namely ns-2, OMNet++, ns-3, SimPy and JiST/SWANS. Our results reveal large differences according to both run-time performance and memory usage.