# A System-Level Methodology for the Design of Reliable Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks
)1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (F.N. )1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, 1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada; dominic.deslandes@[EMAIL_ADDRESS] (D.D. ); frederic.nabki@etsmtl. autonomy in order to evaluate the economic benefits of replacing an existing wired network with a wireless one. The hardware power consumption models are determined using the functional level power analysis (FLPA) methodology [30]. In addition, multiple energy harvesting systems are considered (i.e., solar, wind, and thermal). Dynamic Power Management (DPM) is performed according to a finite state machine (FSM), where the transitions are dictated by the energy saving levels and weather forecasts. Additionally, the authors in [31] present an abstract modelling framework for both sensor-network-level and sensor-node-level modelling and apply a hardware/software co-design approach. The framework is based on SystemC and can be used to model almost all of the aspects from sensors' modes of operation to radio signal propagation. Moreover, at the sensor-node-level, the model is split into two different but tightly dependent and related sections (i.e., software and hardware section). The hardware section helps the estimation of the sensor node's overall power consumption by monitoring the significant parameters of the model, while the software section, on the other hand, comprises tasks models such as processing, I/O tasks, services, and scheduling of a real time operating system (RTOS) model. It helps simulating the functional side, such as the behavior of contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocols [32]. At the sensor-network-level, that work models the physical phenomenon of the environment where the sensor node's hardware model will be integrated. Another interesting contribution is the Powersim C++ class library presented in [33]. It monitors the C++ operators during the simulation of a high-level of abstraction model developed using SystemC in order to estimate a given hardware's power consumption when provided with an energy model. An energy model represents a set of simulated or hardware power consumption measurements of different operators and it is possible for the designer to choose the modules and operators to be monitored by adding a configuration file. The energy model contains a list of energy granularities of each arithmetic and logic operation supported by a given microcontroller unit (MCU). This way, Powersim can calculate the overall energy consumption of the algorithm. The same code was then ported to an MCU and measurements showed that the simulation results with Powersim present an error of 15.8%. In addition, work presented in [34] uses the Stateflow graphical modeling environment [35], which is a component of Simulink, to develop a model-based design framework of an energy-optimized protocol stack for WSNs. It allows the simulation and code generation of WSN applications intended for a variety of implementation platforms.