Modelling and simulation of guaranteed throughput channels of a hard real-time multiprocessor system
Arno Moonen · 2004
accept any responsibility regarding the contents of Master's Theses Consumers have high expectations about the audio and video quality delivered by media processing devices. Applications running on these media processing devices, like high quality multi-window television and MPEG-video decoders, require a computational performance in the order of 10-100 giga operations per second. Embedded systems are quickly evolving towards heterogeneous multi-processor systems, which can provide this performance. An important challenge is to build these systems in a way that they exhibit a predictable temporal behavior. This way it can be guaranteed that the applications will meet their deadlines. The objective of the graduation project was to make a simulation model of the multiprocessor system that can be used to derive the timing behavior of an application that is executed on the system. A Synchronous Data Flow (SDF) graph is introduced in which computation as well as communication is expressed. This SDF graph is constructed in such a way that the worst-case arrival times of data can be observed. To simulate the SDF graph a simulator is built which makes it possible to verify the functional as well as the temporal behavior. From the simulation results it can for example be