Validating a Wireless Protocol Implementation at Binary Level through Simulation Using High Level Description of Protocol Properties in Light Esterel

The development and debugging of a wireless protocol are complex tasks that many face in the industry and academia. This paper aims at facilitating those tasks by proposing a simulation framework that is capable of verifying and validating a protocol stack at binary level. This simulation framework is based on the co-simulation of QEMU and SystemC, which are interfaced through TLMu. An observer module was developed to analyze the traffic in the simulated network, which contains protocol properties modeled in Light Esterel to check that the frame exchanges comply with the protocol properties, in order to validate the protocol implementation. We describe the development of the simulation framework and its node models capable of executing the protocol’s binary stack. We then explain the modeling of protocol properties in Light Esterel and their insertion in the simulation framework. Finally, we test the OCARI protocol for wireless sensor networks in the simulation framework.