Model-based hardware/software synthesis for wireless sensor network applications

In recent years the spectrum of wireless sensor network applications has grown dramatically. Sensor nodes range from very cheap nodes for control dominated applications like temperature, pressure, area and health monitoring to more powerful and sophisticated nodes used for audio and video surveillance. Implementing a low power hardware/software platform for computationally intensive applications such as video surveillance becomes challenging. Fast analysis of hardware/software trade-offs and accurate estimation of different cost functions becomes essential to improve the final quality of results and time to market. In this paper we start from a realistic application domain, namely sound-triggered wireless security cameras, and we show how one can start from an algorithm modeled and validated using Simulink and using commercial state-of-the-art tools explore various possible implementations for a key component, an FFT module. We show how rapid estimations of the various aspects of the cost function can be obtained quickly, using directly the C code generated from Simulink. Implementation results that we obtained are close to previously reported hand optimized results, showing the feasibility of our approach for trade-off analysis.