Wearable Computing

10Development Methodology for BSN Systems

10.1 Introduction

Designing BSN systems is a complex task and formal methods should be adopted to obtain correct, efficient, and cost‐effective solutions. The most common approach is bottom‐up: hardware components are chosen “a priori,” followed by the communication protocols, and finally, applications are programmed atop the identified underlying infrastructure. The opposite design approach is top‐down: high‐level application requirements, driving the design process, are mapped to application‐level frameworks, i.e. a set of programming abstractions and libraries; protocol stacks and hardware platforms are defined subsequently.

This chapter describes a development methodology for BSN systems, based on the SPINE framework, that follows a hybrid hardware–software codesign approach inspired to the Platform‐Based Design (PBD).

10.2 Background

PBD [1] has been originally introduced as a methodology for the design of traditional embedded systems and more recently for WSNs. This methodology defines the design as a sequence of steps that lead from the initial high‐level system description down to the actual implementation. Each step is an iterative refinement process that translates a higher level description to a lower level one that is progressively closer to the final implementation. Each refinement step is obtained by mapping all the components of the higher level description with components (or composition of components) from a lower level description. ...