Reliability Enhancement Strategies for Wireless Communication System

This paper presents the development of a wireless communication system, the Long Range Identification Tag, built and tested in Heriot Watt University. The design commences in Spin, a high level model checking tool optimized for the verification of distributed systems. The abstract software model is synthesized automatically to HDL (Verilog/VHDL) and subsequently downloaded to the targeted FPGA platform. To enhance autonomous capacity of the device, run-time fault tolerance schemes such as watchdog timers and forward error correction routines are also developed. The wireless application is finally tested under a lab emulated EMI scheme and system survivability is examined and quantified. The principal objective of the paper and the associated research project (launched in 2002) is to investigate how a number of high-level reliability enhancement strategies can be utilized to promote more dependable embedded applications.