A SystemC-centric Approach for Simulation and Generation of WSN Applications Targeted to ZigBee

Development of applications for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires a high effort due to the really limited resources available on sensor nodes, to the presence of bare operating systems and to the need to be compliant with emerging standards, such as ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4. In this paper, a novel approach for the development of WSN applications is presented and exemplified to the specific case of the ZigBee standard. The programming paradigm considered in this work is the object-oriented one, familiar to most SW developers. The aim is to simulate the applications for functional validation and to map them onto a particular HW/SW architecture. SystemC and middleware SW are the key components of the followed approach. SystemC provides the traditional object-oriented paradigm and the simulation environment. Platform peculiarities are first masked by middleware services and then mapped onto the services of an actual middleware, e.g., the ZigBee stack. ZigBee profiles are also supported, thus obtaining an even more optimized code. The approach has been applied to an actual application on the Texas Instruments’ ZigBee Development Kit.