SCE-Comm: A Real-Time Inter-Core Communication Framework for Strictly Partitioned Multi-core Processors

Multicore processors provide great average case performance. However, the use of multicore processors for safety-critical applications can lead to catastrophic consequences because of contention on shared resources. The problem has been well-studied in literature and solutions such as partitioning of shared resources have been proposed. Strict partitioning of memory resources among cores, however, does not allow inter-core communication. In this paper, we propose Communication Core Model (CCM) that implements the inter-core communication by bounding the amount of intercore interference in a partitioned multi-core system. A system-level perspective of how to realize such CCM along with the implementation details is provided. We compare our proposed CCM with Contention-based Communication (CBC) model where no private banking is enforced for any core. For evaluation, we consider San Diego vision benchmark suite (SD-VBS). The results of the evaluation show that the CCM offers 56 percent improvement in worst case execution time (WCET) when compared with CBC.