A SystemC-based Simulator for Design Space Exploration of Smart Wireless Systems

Smart wireless techniques are at the core of many today's telecommunication and networked embedded systems where performance are enhanced by intertwining radio frequency (RF) and digital aspects. Therefore their design requires to focus on both domains. Traditional approaches for their simulation rely either on different domain-specific tools or on analog-mixed-signal modeling languages. In the former case, the simulation of the whole platform in the same run is not possible while in the latter case, simulation performance are limited by the computationally most intensive domain (usually RF). We present an extension of the SystemC Network Simulation Library that allows to simulate antenna details and node position together with digital hardware and software. The validation on a real wearable system shows that the proposed simulation approach achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed thus allowing fast exploration of various configurations in the early phase of the design flow without recurring to the expensive and time-consuming creation of physical prototypes.