A Physical-Aware Abstraction Flow for Efficient Design-Space Exploration of a Wireless Body Area Network Application

This paper presents abstraction techniques and modeling approaches to include physical-level antenna and receiver performance effects in a system-level network simulation for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). The simulation platform is based on SystemC which can be used to model digital HW and SW aspects of an embedded application. By using the SystemC Network Simulation Library also a distributed network scenario can be simulated. Here, this platform has been extended to take into account the bit error rate and the path loss associated with antenna positioning in close proximity to the human body and with the design parameters of the wireless receiver. Antenna effects are modeled through a database of performance values based on physical measurements on a human phantom. Path loss information is fed in the SystemC simulator to model the received signal strength as a function of the position of nodes. The same information is used in the physical-level simulation of the receiver to extract bit error rate curves to be used by the SystemC simulator to build a statistical model of packet corruption. Instead of physical-level details, their effects are modeled in a parametric way into the system-level simulation thus combining speed and fidelity and allowing cross-domain design space exploration.