Tighter time analysis for real-time traffic in on-chip networks with shared priorities

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the preferred interconnection medium for massively parallel platforms. Targeting real-time applications, fixed-priority based NoCs with virtual channels have been proposed as a promising solution. In order to verify if specific time requirements can be satisfied, schedulability tests are typically used. Several analysis approaches have been proposed targeting priority-based NoCs. However, due to the approximation considered in the analyses, the results may involve a large amount of pessimism. The applicability of the analyses is thus limited in practice. In this paper, we identify a number of properties of NoCs with shared priorities. An improved time analysis is proposed where pessimism can be significantly reduced for many cases. In order to evaluate the proposed analysis, a number of experiments have been generated along with a case study based on an automotive application. The improvement can be clearly observed from the evaluation results.