Leveraging traffic injection and quality-of-service to control the reconfiguration delay

Modern real-time embedded systems increasingly use runtime reconfigurable architectures to reduce size, weight, and power while ensuring predictability. However, reconfiguration delay is non-negligible and varies due to resource contention. Unlike existing solutions that affect system resources or timing, this paper presents an approach and tools to provide a safe, tight reconfiguration delay bound by accurately modeling contention, without additional resource usage, and applicable to most embedded Systems-on-Chip. Additionally, by using Quality-of-Service mechanisms available in modern systems-on-chip, the proposed approach allows designers to set an upper limit for the reconfiguration delay and maintain it against interference from competing tasks. To evaluate the proposed approach, we present two experiments in which it is applied to a representative configuration on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ platform. Experimental results indicate that the reconfiguration delay bound holds under induced worst-case interference scenarios, ensuring that, under heavy workload conditions, the reconfiguration delay can be up to 6.3 times its value in isolation. Moreover, the approach can automatically generate a quality-of-service configuration that ensures a maximum reconfiguration delay 1.8 times its value in isolation, with only a 14% slowdown on contenders and no additional resource consumption, outperforming the existing state of the art.