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.