Static analysis of multi-core TDMA resource arbitration delays

Abstract

In the development of hard real-time systems, knowledge of the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) is needed to guarantee the safety of a system. For single-core systems, static analyses have been developed which are able to derive guaranteed bounds on a program's WCET. Unfortunately, these analyses cannot directly be applied to multi-core scenarios, where the different cores may interfere with each other during the access to shared resources like for example shared buses or memories. For the arbitration of such resources, TDMA arbitration has been shown to exhibit favorable timing predictability properties. In this article, we review and extend a methodology for analyzing access delays for TDMA-arbitrated resources. Formal proofs of the correctness of these methods are given and a thorough experimental evaluation is carried out, where the presented techniques are compared to preexisting ones on an extensive set of real-world benchmarks for different classes of analyzed systems.