Efficient protocol design flow for embedded systems

It is predicted that, in the next years, wireless sensor networks could be massively deployed in a wide variety of application areas, such as agriculture, logistics, automation, or infrastructure monitoring. An extremely low power consumption, high dependability, and low cost are common requirements for sensor nodes in all these applications. This can be achieved only by tiny, power-efficient microcontrollers and communication systems integrated on a single chip. Formal description techniques, such as SDL (Specification and Description Language), are suitable to formally prove properties of models designed in these languages. Code generators facilitate the automatic transformation of SDL models into software implementations, while preserving the properties of the model and, thus, achieving high system dependability. The implementations consist of the translated state machine behavior and, additionally, require a run-time environment for model execution. The objective of this work was to investigate an integrated design flow for embedded systems, which should allow the development of efficient and dependable system implementations from abstract SDL specifications. In this thesis, concepts for minimal SDL run-time environment have been devised and realized by an example implementation. Not only pure software implementations should be considered, but starting from these also the hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning of the system should be supported. For this purpose, a cosimulation framework that allows the coupling of an instruction set simulator (ISS) with a functional SDL simulation has been investigated and prototypically implemented within the scope of this thesis. By shifting functionality to dedicated hardware components it is possible to take computational load from the microcontroller and to decrease the overall energy consumption by reducing the clock frequency and lowering the supply voltage. Due to the use of SDL, the design flow lends itself particularly to the implementation of communication protocols, and is limited to applications with soft real-time requirements. For an SDL-based design flow targeted to resource-constrained embedded systems, concepts and real implementations of minimal SDL run-time environments were lacking. Available software tools, indeed, enable the transformation of SDL models into C code, however for an efficient implementation, an integration into existing real-time operating systems (RTOS) for small microcontrollers is essential.