Deriving reliability estimates of distributed real-time systems by simulation

Industrial deployment of academic real-time techniques still struggles to gain momentum due to the non-familiarity of industry with schedulability analysis, as well as the lack of appropriate commercial tools. Moreover, it is imperative that academia realises the extent of the pessimism for the proposed techniques, which often makes them less attractive to systems developers. The possible trade-offs in timing guarantees vs. reliability is one such key area which needs closer study and scrutiny. There is a need for less stringent guarantees in order to avoid costly overdesigns of systems. We present a framework and simulation based methodology for reliability analysis of distributed real-time systems. We have developed a tool which is quite versatile and can accommodate varied task models, network topologies and scheduling paradigms. The tool is illustrated by a comprehensive case-study. Since our method is based on simulation, which is a standard practice in many industrial projects, we believe it will be more comprehensible and acceptable to industry.