Hardware/software partitioning for telecommunications systems

Abstract

Telecommunications systems, like other embedded systems, are dataflow systems, easily represented by a set of tasks and precedence constraints. The main goal of the design of such systems is to determine for each task the assignment (hardware or software), the scheduling and resources required. We consider assignment and scheduling to be closely linked in hardware/software partitioning and therefore propose a new approach to hardware/software partitioning using task scheduling. This approach is a list scheduling algorithm, based on the calculation of forces. The results obtained on a telecommunications system (acoustic echo canceller) are then described.