Modeling of communication infrastructure for design-space exploration

Computer-aided design has been traditionally applied to computers and embedded systems but not to the communication infrastructure among them. The paper contributes to fill this gap by proposing to use a mathematical language to model a distributed application in terms of tasks, hosting nodes, and interactions with the environment. Tasks are described in terms of computation and communication requirements also in relationship with state-of-the-art languages for system specification. Entities and relationships are introduced to relate tasks, data flows and environmental data to network nodes, channels among them and communication protocols. The resulting attributes and constraints can be used during a further design space exploration to synthesize automatically a suitable communication infrastructure. The approach can be applied to significant applications, e.g., those based on wireless sensor networks and peer-to-peer networks. An example related to building automation is also reported to demonstrate the potentiality of the framework.