Response-Time Analysis for ATM Networks

The ability to guarantee timely delivery of messages is crucial in the design and validation of distributed hard real-time systems. The use of such systems is increasing, due to both the increased performance and reliability they can offer, and the need to control physically distributed equipment. As a consequence, methods to provide timeliness guarantees become more important. To support the guarantee of timely delivery, this thesis presents (1) a method to determine the worst case response-time for messages sent over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks, and (2) a method to determine how much buffer memory is needed in each ATM switch in the network. In addition, we present an associated priority assignment algorithm, which is essential for achieving efficient sharing of network resources. The presented methods are intended for call admission control of hard real-time traffic, i.e. they can be used to determine whether new traffic can be admitted or not. Our analysis methods are..