Analysis of buffering effects on hard real-time priority-preemptive wormhole networks

Abstract: There are several approaches to analyse the worst-case response times of sporadic packets transmitted over priority-preemptive wormhole networks. In this paper, we provide an overview of the different approaches, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and propose an approach that captures all effects considered by previous approaches while providing tight yet safe upper bounds for packet response times. We specifically address the problems created by buffering and backpressure in wormhole networks, which amplifies the problem of indirect interference in a way that has not been considered by the early analysis approaches. Didactic examples and large-scale experiments with synthetically generated packet flow sets provide evidence of the strength of the proposed approach.