SystemClick — A domain-specific framework for early exploration using functional performance models

A wireless network (WLAN) provides unique challenges to system design. A WLAN uses a shared and highly unreliable medium, where protocols must rely on precise timing of requests and responses to detect submission errors and priorities among network nodes. In addition, WLAN stations are often embedded and have tight constraints on power, costs, and performance. To design WLAN nodes, precise estimations on performance and resource usage are needed for the complete network system to explore the design space and assess the quality of solutions. Our SystemClick framework combines SystemC with resource models and performance annotations derived from actual implementations based on Click. Model generation is automated, and the performance of a SystemClick model is obtained depending on actual activation patterns of different functional blocks in the model. A 802.11 a/b/g/e case study demonstrates our approach for the analysis of real-time critical systems.