Design Methodologies for Wireless Systems: Case Studies

Fernando De Bernardinis, 2001 M.S. (advisor: Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli).

. Wireless systems usually consist of networks of mobile terminals and possibly remote servers (e.g. coordinating the network operation or handling data storage). The design of a single network unit, terminal or server, cannot be done independently on the rest of the network. First, it is necessary to partition the functionality between network nodes. Then, a protocol has to be designed, i.e. the set of control messages and data packets that are exchanged between the communicating units and the set of rules that define when data are transmitted and received. This requires, among other things, to select the network topology and derive from the requirements of the whole network the functional and performance constraints that each network unit has to satisfy. In this work, we present a design methodology based on the Polis methodology to face the new challenge. Starting from formally defined models of computations, a series of orthogonalizations is performed to formalize the design and allow extensive design explorations and optimizations. Initially, functionality is separated from architecture, time from behavior and communication from computation. Then, through a series of design refinements/mappings an optimized implementation is generated. The design methodology has been tested through commercial and academic tools, such as Polis, Cadence VCC, Coware N2C and ns.