Investigating Dependability of Short-Range Wireless Embedded Systems through Hardware Platform Based Design

Most of the links in future wireless communication networks will be established over relatively short distances. This new direction in wireless communication is adopted and being developed by embedded multimedia applications leaders. Moreover, these short range communications are introduced into critical applications, where the dependability/reliability is mandatory. Thus, dependability concerns around reliability evaluation becomes an essential question to answer, and poses several challenges. Obviously, it´s particularly difficult to investigate the reliability of such mixed HW/SW IPs based systems. Therefore, dependability has to be investigated at different abstractions levels, and for all components integrated into the system being designed. In this paper, we discuss the investigation of dependability in wireless short range systems. Firstly we show how a HW platform based dependability investigation can be a very interactive approach; secondly, we describe a real experience in building a wireless hardware platform for short range systems dependability analysis, and finally, based on this wireless network platform, we propose a dependability flow that takes care of the heterogeneous parts of the wireless embedded systems.