Heterogeneous co-simulation with SDL and SystemC for protocol modeling

This paper proposes a heterogeneous co-simulation environment using SDL (specification and description language) and SystemC. The medium access control (MAC) protocol of IEEE802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is given as an example applied to this co-simulation approach. After functional specification and software-hardware partitioning processes, we designed a sub-part of MAC that requires real-time operations by SystemC, and the other sub-part assumed to be mostly software-executable by SDL. Those two MAC entities are simultaneously simulated on our proposed simulation platform for the purpose of protocol conformance testing and performance evaluation. The paper also presents the basic architecture to enable signal interaction and system timer synchronization between the SDL-designed part and the SystemC-designed part.