SystemC Model Generation for Realistic Simulation of Networked Embedded Systems

Verification and design-space exploration of today's embedded systems require the simulation of heterogeneous aspects of the system, i.e., software, hardware, communications. This work shows the use of SystemC to simulate a model-driven specification of the behavior of a networked embedded system together with a complete network scenario consisting of the radio channel, the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless personal area networks and concurrent traffic sharing the medium. The paper describes the main issues addressed to generate SystemC modules from Matlab/Stateflow descriptions and to integrate them in a complete network scenario. Simulation results on a healthcare wireless sensor network show the validity of the approach

Network-aware design-space exploration of a power-efficient embedded application

The paper presents the design and multi-parameter optimization of a networked embedded application for the health-care domain. Several hardware, software, and application parameters, such as clock frequency, sensor sampling rate, data packet rate, are tuned at design- and run-time according to application specifications and operating conditions to optimize hardware requirements, packet loss, power consumption. Experimental results show that further power efficiency can be achieved by considering also communication aspects during design space exploratio

Virtual Platform-Based Design Space Exploration of Power-Efficient Distributed Embedded Applications

Networked embedded systems are essential building blocks of a broad variety of distributed applications ranging from agriculture to industrial automation to healthcare and more. These often require specific energy optimizations to increase the battery lifetime or to operate using energy harvested from the environment. Since a dominant portion of power consumption is determined and managed by software, the software development process must have access to the sophisticated power management mechanisms provided by state-of-the-art hardware platforms to achieve the best tradeoff between system availability and reactivity. Furthermore, internode communications must be considered to properly assess the energy consumption. This article describes a design flow based on a SystemC virtual platform including both accurate power models of the hardware components and a fast abstract model of the wireless network. The platform allows both model-driven design of the application and the exploration of power and network management alternatives. These can be evaluated in different network scenarios, allowing one to exploit power optimization strategies without requiring expensive field trials. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via experiments on a wireless body area network application

The COMPLEX reference framework for HW/SW co-design and power management supporting platform-based design-space exploration

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Design Framework for Heterogeneous Hardware and Software in Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceWireless Sensor Networks are composed of many autonomous resource-constrained sensor nodes. Constrains are low energy, memory and processing speed. Nowadays, several limitations exist for heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks: various hardware and software are hardly supported at design and simulation levels. Meanwhile, to optimize a self-organized network, it is essential to be able to update it with new nodes, to ensure interoperability, and to be able to exchange not only data but functionalities between nodes. Moreover, it is difficult to make design space exploration, as accurate hardware-level models and network-level simulations have very different (opposite) levels. We propose a simulator-based on SystemC language-that allows such design space explorations. It is composed of a library of hardware and software blocks. More and more sophisticated software support is implemented in our simulator. As trend is to deploy heterogeneous nodes, various software levels have to be considered. Our simulator is also thought to support many levels: from machine code to high level languages

A Holistic Approach to Functional Safety for Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

Functional safety is a significant concern in today's networked cyber-physical systems such as connected machines, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent environments. Simulation is a well-known methodology for the assessment of functional safety. Simulation models of networked cyber-physical systems are very heterogeneous relying on digital hardware, analog hardware, and network domains. Current functional safety assessment is mainly focused on digital hardware failures while minor attention is devoted to analog hardware and not at all to the interconnecting network. In this work we believe that in networked cyber-physical systems, the dependability must be verified not only for the nodes in isolation but also by taking into account their interaction through the communication channel. For this reason, this work proposes a holistic methodology for simulation-based safety assessment in which safety mechanisms are tested in a simulation environment reproducing the high-level behavior of digital hardware, analog hardware, and network communication. The methodology relies on three main automatic processes: 1) abstraction of analog models to transform them into system-level descriptions, 2) synthesis of network infrastructures to combine multiple cyber-physical systems, and 3) multi-domain fault injection in digital, analog, and network. Ultimately, the flow produces a homogeneous optimized description written in C++ for fast and reliable simulation which can have many applications. The focus of this thesis is performing extensive fault simulation and evaluating different functional safety metrics, \eg, fault and diagnostic coverage of all the safety mechanisms

Simulation Domains for Networked Embedded Systems

ABSTRACT Networked embedded systems are a fast growing application for embedded systems. Choices taken during the system design can influence the network configuration and vice versa. It poses new challenges in design and simulation domains. It is very important at the early stages of the design of networked embedded systems to simulate both embedded systems and networked environment in which they operate. Besides, due to limited available energy, simulate the energy consumption in networked embedded systems is also almost imperative. In this paper, we propose a new view for design and analysis of simulator for networked embedded systems defining four domains to capture and describe networked embedded systems with purpose of simulation. It is also presented an elaborate comparison and analysis of four simulators designed to networked embedded systems

CONTREX: Design of embedded mixed-criticality CONTRol systems under consideration of EXtra-functional properties

The increasing processing power of today’s HW/SW platforms leads to the integration of more and more functions in a single device. Additional design challenges arise when these functions share computing resources and belong to different criticality levels. CONTREX complements current activities in the area of predictable computing platforms and segregation mechanisms with techniques to consider the extra-functional properties, i.e., timing constraints, power, and temperature. CONTREX enables energy efficient and cost aware design through analysis and optimization of these properties with regard to application demands at different criticality levels. This article presents an overview of the CONTREX European project, its main innovative technology (extension of a model based design approach, functional and extra-functional analysis with executable models and run-time management) and the final results of three industrial use-cases from different domain (avionics, automotive and telecommunication).The work leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2011 under grant agreement no. 611146