Virtual Platform-based Design Space Exploration of Power-Efficient Distributed Embedded Applications

Networked embedded systems are essential building blocks of a broad variety of distributed applications ranging from agriculture, to industrial automation, to health care, and more. These often require specific energy optimizations to increase the battery lifetime or to operate using energy harvested from the environment. Since a dominant portion of power consumption is determined and managed by software, the software development process must have access to the sophisticated power management mechanisms provided by state-of-the-art hardware platforms to achieve the best trade-off between system availability and reactivity. Furthermore, inter-node communications must be considered to properly assess the energy consumption. This paper describes a design flow based on a SystemC virtual platform including both accurate power models of the hardware components and a fast abstract model of the wireless network. The platform allows both model-driven design of the application, as well as the exploration of power and network management alternatives. These can be evaluated in different network scenarios, allowing one to exploit power optimization strategies without requiring expensive field trials. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via experiments on a wireless body area network application.