Towards the verification of industrial communication protocols through a simulation environment based on QEMU and systemC

This paper aims at presenting an approach to validate, verify and debug a wireless communication protocol through the use of simulated models. We discuss the main issues in validating a communication protocol, as well as the merits and limitations of the existing solutions to verify network protocol stack binary codes by using simulation. We then describe the development of a simulation framework where the node's hardware platform is modeled with QEMU and SystemC, and the development of an observer module which analyzes the frames exchanged to detect anomalies. This approach is validated with a protocol named OCARI based on the IEEE 802.15.4 (LR-WPAN) standard, which is currently in its pre-industrialization phase. The experimental results demonstrate the functional correctness of our node model implementation, and show how a protocol property can be checked during simulation with the developed simulation framework.