Timing Analysis for Resource Access Interference on Adaptive Resource Arbiters

Modern multiprocessor and multicore architectures adopt shared resources to meet increased performance requirements. Adaptive arbiters, such as FlexRay, have been adopted to grant access to shared resources. While increasing the performance, timing analysis is more challenging with this kind of arbiter. This paper considers real-time tasks that are composed of super blocks, while super blocks themselves are composed of phases. Phases are characterized by their worst-case computation time on their processing element and their worst-case number of access requests to a shared resource. Resource accesses, such as access to caches or scratchpad memory, are synchronous and cause the processing element to stall until the access is served. Based on dynamic programming, we develop an algorithm that safely derives an upper-bound of the worst-case response time of a phase. The worst-case response time of a task can then be determined for both sequential or time-triggered execution of super blocks. Experimental results are conducted for a real-world application.