A hybrid performance analysis technique for distributed real-time embedded systems

Abstract

It remains a challenging problem to tightly estimate the worst-case response time of an application in a distributed embedded system, especially when there are dependencies between tasks. Recently, a holistic worst-case response time analysis approach called scheduling time bound analysis has been proposed to find a tight upper bound of the worst-case response times of applications specified by a set of task graphs. Since it assumes that the starting offsets of applications are known and fixed, it fails to make a tight estimation despite increased computation time when the starting offsets are dynamic. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel conservative performance analysis, called hybrid performance analysis, combining the response time analysis technique and the scheduling time bound analysis technique to compute a tighter bound faster. The proposed scheme is proven to be conservative formally. Through extensive experiments with real-life benchmarks and synthetic examples, the superior performance of our proposed approach compared with previous methods is confirmed.