Testing the data freshness properties of asynchronous communication mechanisms
Fei Xia · 2007
Data freshness properties of asynchronous communication mechanisms (ACMs) are related to the relative timing of reader and writer statements. When a hardware implementation of an ACM is tested at the highest operating speed, such relative timing is difficult to measure if the observing hardware is not constructed of faster technology than the ACM. Here an indirect method is proposed whereby the data freshness properties of any ACM hardware may be inferred from data sequencing information. 2 Introduction Data communication between processes running in different processors has been extensively studied, especially in distributed and real-time systems. The minimal form of this problem concerns the passing of data between two distributed single-thread processes. One provides the data, which is used by the other. This is schematically shown in Figure 1. process 1 process 2 data Figure 1 Passing data between two processes. In distributed systems, processors may not always share a common ...