A Framework for Modeling, Simulation and Automatic Code Generation of Sensor Network Application

Abstract

Showing functional correctness by simulation before implementation, and preserving it by automated code generation, is extremely useful to reduce the development time for an embedded application. This is even more true for wireless sensor networks, since their nodes often provide very rudimentary debugging facilities, and sufficiently large networks for realistic analysis may be expensive to deploy. While this approach, also known as model-based design, is becoming quite standard for several domains that have similar constraints as wireless sensor networks, such as automotive electronics, there is a lack of tools for this purpose in the WSN world. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we present a framework (based on Simulink, Stateflow and Embedded Coder) in which an engineer can create sensor network components (both at the application and at the protocol level) that can be used as building blocks to model, simulate and automatically generate code for different underlying platforms and operating systems.