Compressing Microcontroller Execution Traces to Assist System Analysis

Abstract. Recent technological advances have made possible the re-trieval of execution traces on microcontrollers. However, the huge amount of data in the collected trace makes the trace analysis extremely diffi-cult and time-consuming. In this paper, by leveraging both cycles and repetitions present in an execution trace, we present an approach which offers a compact and accurate trace compression. This compression may be used during the trace analysis without decompression, notably for identifying repeated cycles or comparing different cycles. The evalua-tion demonstrates that our approach reaches high compression ratios on microcontroller execution traces.