Performance estimation for real-time distributed embedded systems

Many embedded computing systems are distributed systems: communicating processes executing on several CPUs/ASICs connected by communication links. This paper describes a new, efficient analysis algorithm to derive tight bounds on the execution time required for an application task executing on a distributed system. Tight bounds are essential to cosynthesis algorithms. Our bounding algorithms are valid for a general problem model: the system can contain several tasks with different periods; each task is partitioned into a set of processes related by data dependencies; the periods and the computation times of processes are bounded but not necessarily constant. Experimental results show that our algorithm can find tight bounds in small amounts of CPU time.