Functional Framework and Hardware Platform for Dependability Study in Short Range Wireless Embedded Systems

A new direction in short-range wireless applications has appeared in the form of high-speed data communication devices for distances of a few meters. Behind these embedded applications, a complex Hardware/Software architecture is built. Dependability is one of the major challenges in these systems. Obviously in such systems, the attribute reliability has to be investigated for various components and at different abstractions levels. This paper presents a hardware platform for wireless system dependability analysis as an alternative for the time consuming global system simulation technique. The platform is built using several instances of one of the commercial FPGA platforms available on the market place. Based on this platform we introduce a new methodology and a flow to investigate the different parts of system dependability at different abstraction levels. The benefits to use the proposed methodology are two fold: first it takes care of the whole system (HW/SW part, mixed RF and wireless part) and second, the hardware platform enables to explore the application´s reliability under real environmental conditions in order to study the effect of the environment threats on the system.