End-to-end schedulability tests for multiprocessor embedded systems based on networks-on-chip with priority-preemptive arbitration

Simulation-based techniques can be used to evaluate whether a particular NoC-based platform configuration is able to meet the timing constraints of an application, but they can only evaluate a finite set of scenarios. In safety-critical applications with hard real-time constraints, this is clearly not sufficient because there is an expectation that the application should be schedulable on that platform in all possible scenarios. This paper presents a particular NoC-based multiprocessor architecture, as well as a number of analytical methods that can be derived from that architecture, aiming to allow designers to check, for a given platform configuration, whether all application tasks and communication messages always meet their hard real-time constraints in every possible scenario. Experiments are presented, showing the use of the proposed methods when evaluating different task mapping and platform topologies.