Latency analysis for data chains of real-time periodic tasks

A data chain is a sequence of periodic realtime communicating tasks that are processing the data from sensors up to actuators. It determines an order in which the tasks propagate data but not in which they are executed: inter-task communication and scheduling are independent. In this paper, we focus on the latency computation, considered as the time elapsed from getting the data from an input and processing it to an output of a data chain. We propose a method for the worst-case latency calculation of periodic tasks' data chains executed by a partitioned fixed-priority preemptive scheduler upon a multiprocessor platform. As far as we know, there is no such formal approach based on closed-form expression for communicating real-time tasks.