Dependability Investigation of Wireless Short Range Embedded Systems: Hardware Platform Oriented Approach

B. Senouci^1, , H.G. Kerkhoff², M.J. Bentum² and A.J Annema²

¹Embedded Systems Department, LACS Laboratory, Central Electronic Engineering School ECE- Paris, France

²Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Faculty, University of Twente, Netherlands

Cite this paper:
B. Senouci, H.G. Kerkhoff, M.J. Bentum and A.J Annema. Dependability Investigation of Wireless Short Range Embedded Systems: Hardware Platform Oriented Approach. Journal of Embedded Systems. 2015; 3(1):1-10. doi: 10.12691/jes-3-1-1

Abstract

A new direction in short-range wireless applications has appeared in the form of high-speed data communication devices for distances of hundreds meters. Behind these embedded applications, a complex heterogeneous architecture is built. Moreover, these short range communications are introduced into critical applications, where the dependability/reliability is mandatory. Thus, dependability concerns around reliability evaluation become a major challenge in these systems, and pose several questions to answer. Obviously, in such systems, the attribute reliability has to be investigated for various components and at different abstraction levels. In this paper, we discuss the investigation of dependability in wireless short range systems. We present a hardware platform for wireless system dependability analysis as an alternative for the time consuming simulation techniques. The platform is built using several instances of one of the commercial FPGA platforms available on the market place. We describe the different steps of building the wireless hardware platform for short range systems dependability analysis. Then, we show how this HW platform based dependability investigation framework can be a very interactive approach. Based on this platform we introduce a new methodology and a flow to investigate the different parts of system dependability at different abstraction levels. The benefits to use the proposed framework are three fold: first, it takes care of the whole system (HW/SW -digital part, mixed RF part, and wireless part); Second, the hardware platform enables to explore the application’s reliability under real environmental conditions taking into account the effect of the environment threats on the system; And last, the wireless platform built for dependability investigation present a fast investigation approach in comparison with the time consuming co-simulation technique.

Keywords:
embedded systems dependability/reliability HW/SW co-design FPGA based design wireless short range radio COTS

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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