System-Level Design Methodologies for Networked Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip

models of various processing elements and simulating the whole system to check if the tasks meet their local and/or end-to-end deadlines under precedence and resource constraints. This work has also formed the basis for other system-level modeling-related research activities such as networks-on-chip and reconfigurable computing platforms. Chapter 6 describes a further extension of our earlier work on SystemC-based multiprocessor system-on-chip modeling framework which can provide the wireless sensor network designers a system-level abstraction of the sensor network for system-level design-space exploration to meet the requirements mentioned above. Though our aim has been to develop a general sensor network modeling environment, we have actually been driven by a real-life sensor network application − the Hogthrob project which, as described above, is concerned with the development of a wireless sensor network infrastructure for sow monitoring. In our SystemC-based modeling framework, a sensor network model is designed following the principle of composition. We model a sensor network at two levels: the sensor network level and the sensor node level. At the sensor node level, a sensor node platform model is split into two sections: the software section for functional simultion of the sensor node platform and the hardware section to enable estimation of the energy consumption of the sensor node platform. The software section of the sensor node platform model consists of the application model, comprising a set of task models and the RTOS model, composed of a set of RTOS services. At the sensor network level, a sensor node platform model is embedded in an environment model that models the environmental phenomena to be sensed by the sensor network application. To bridge the abstraction gap between the system-level abstract sensor network model (mentioned above) and the implementation-level, cycle-accurate sensor node model (mentioned later), we have introduced an intermediate-level bridging model based on transaction-level modeling concepts that attempts to connect the top-level and the bottom-level models in a consistent manner. This model is described in Chapter 6. 1.2 An Outline of the Thesis 23 1.2.3 Wireless Sensor Node Design & Test and Cycle-