SystemC fine-grained HW-SW fully heterogeneous WSN simulation and UML metamodel behavioural extraction
Wireless sensor networks are becoming an essential part of our lives, being frequently used for monitoring and control applications. It is essential that these networks be modelled before their deployment so as to identify the possible problems that may arise. SystemC is fast becoming an important modelling paradigm in the context of SoC design and verification, as well as other fields that require accurate (sometimes Transaction Level Modelled) characterization of digital processes (i.e.: communication on a bus interface, over a radio channel, etc). SystemC has successfully been used in the IDEA1 WSN exploration framework to model wireless sensor networks at the timed functional level of abstraction. As a first contribution, we refined the initial implementation of IDEA1 to cope with a finer-grade simulation of the node hardware, going beyond the timed functional description of the node and enabling support for a bus cycle-accurate simulation. The new and improved version is called IDEA1TLM and can also model the software aspect of the nodes in question by means of a custom-built instruction set simulator called BLISS. The second part of this contribution focuses on extracting the metamodel from SystemC source files. The metamodel is the information which can be generated concerning the model; in our case, a diagram representation with states and transitions between them. Because current work focuses on generating C++ code (SystemC-compliant) from UML metamodels, there is no support to achieve this in reverse. We developed a tool called DiaSig that takes SystemC source files as input and generates UML diagrams of the model in SVG format.
systemc wsn uml metamodel idea1tlm fine simulation