RaPTEX

Goal

Many embedded systems rely on communication to exchange information and coordinate activities in spatially distributed applications. Developing communication systems that satisfy specific application requirements is a challenge due to the many trade-offs imposed by different choices of protocols and parameters. Furthermore, evaluating the correctness and the performance of the design and implementation before deploying it is a non-trivial task due to the complexity of the resulting system. To this end, we develop a tool enabling rapid prototyping of communication protoocls for embedded systems, consisting of three major subsystems: a graphical toolbox, an analytical performance estimation framework, and an emulation environment. We use a hierarchical approach in the design of the graphical toolbox to facilitate the composition of the network stack. For fast exploration of the trade-off space at design time, we build a theoretical performance estimation model for energy consumption, delay, and throughput. For realistic performance evaluation and debugging, we design and implement a hybrid, accurate, yet scalable, emulation environment.