DTFM: a Flexible Model for Schedulability Analysis of Real-Time Applications on NoC-based Architectures

also publiseh in "4th IEEE International Workshop on Real-Time Computing and Distributed systems in Emerging Applications (REACTION)", nov 2016International audienceMany-core processors are expected to be hardware targets to support the execution of real-time applications. In a many-coreprocessor, cores communicate through a Network-On-Chip (NoC), which offers high bandwidth and scalability, but also introduces contentionsleading to additional variability to task execution times. Such contentions also strongly increase the pessimistic trend of worst case execution timeestimation. Consequently, modeling and analysis of network contentions interferences on many-core processors is a challenge to support real-time applications. In this article, we formalize a dual task and flow model called DTFM. From the specification of a real-time applicationcomposed of a set of tasks and their communication dependencies, DTFM allows us to compute flow requirements and to assess predictability ofthe tasks. DTFM is extensible enough to be adapted to various NoCs and task models, allowing designers to compare candidate software and NoCarchitectures. Furthermore, we introduce an original validation approach based on the cross-use of a task level real-time scheduling analysis tooland a cycle-accurate SystemC NoC simulator