Accurate yet fast modeling of real-time communication

Accurate modeling of communication is a necessary part of system level design for real-time safety-critical applications. For efficient prediction of a system's performance, transaction level modeling (TLM) is often used which increases the simulation speed by orders of magnitude. The speed advantage, however, comes at the cost of low accuracy. In this paper, we use a novel modeling technique, called result oriented modeling (ROM), which yields 100% accuracy in timing, yet approaches the same speed as traditional TLM. ROM also abstracts away internal details of the communication but, in contrast to TLM, fully maintains accurate timing. ROM optimistically predicts the timing and retroactively takes corrective measures, if necessary. In this paper, we compare the ROM technique to TLM at different levels of abstraction, using a controller area network (CAN) bus example. Our results show that ROM yields a simulation speedup close to the traditional TLM, yet exhibits the same timing accuracy as a bus functional model. Thus, for safety-critical real-time applications, ROM is a viable replacement for the inaccurate TLM.