A formal model for the analysis and verification of a pre-emptive round-robin arbiter

Abstract

Resource arbitration is a fundamental problem in communication and computing system design. Thus, a fast and efficient arbitration algorithm is one of the most dominant factors for high performance networks-on-chip (NoCs) and ensuring their reliability and performance is highly required. In this context, we propose, a formal model for the analysis and validation of the round-robin protocol, considered as the most widely adopted scheduling algorithm, in particular for real-time applications. The contribution of this paper is first to propose a high-level formal, distributed and scalable model for round-robin arbiter based on the formalism of timed automata. We then employ model checking, to verify a set of relevant properties of the round-robin protocol such as deadlock freedom and invariant. In order to evaluate the efficiency and the scalability of the protocol under study, a set of experimental results are presented based on an automatically generated code of our proposed model.