Performance guarantees by simulation of process

In this paper we derive the end-to-end temporal behavior of real-time applications that are described as process networks. We demonstrate that a tight upper bound on the arrival time of data can be derived by simulation of this process network. We also show that the effects of arbitration can be taken into account if resources are reserved. For an H263 video decoder example we derive by means of simulation the settings of the schedulers and the buffer capacities. We arrive at the conclusion that for this application a close to maximum throughput is obtained with small buffers if only one process is executed on each processor. Larger buffers are needed if processors are shared and processes are executed during long time-slices