TIGHTER INTER-CORE DELAYS IN MULTI-CORE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS UNDER PARTITIONED SCHEDULING

Abstract: There exists an increasing demand for computing power and performance in real-time embedded systems, as new, more complex customer requirements and function-alities are appearing every day. In order to support these requirements and func-tionalities without breaking the power consumption wall, many embedded systems areswitching from traditional single-core hardware architectures to multi-core architec-tures. Multi-core architectures allow for parallel execution of tasks on the multiplecores. This introduces many benets from the perspective of achievable performance,but in turn introduces major issues when it comes to the timing predictability ofthe real-time embedded system applications deployed on them. The problem arisesfrom unpredictable and potentially unbounded inter-core interferences, which occuras a result of contention for the shared resources, such as the shared system busor shared system memory. This thesis studies the possible application of constraintprogramming as a resource optimization technique for the purpose of creating oineschedules for tasks in real-time embedded system applications executing on a dual-core architecture. The main focus is placed on tightening inter-core data-propagationinterferences, which can result in lower over-all data-propagation delays. A proto-type of an optimization engine, employing constraint programming techniques on ap-plications comprised of tasks structured according to the Phased Execution Model isdeveloped. The prototype is evaluated through several experiments on a large numberof industry inspired intellectual-property free benchmarks. Alongside the experimentsa case study is conducted on an example engine-control application and the resultingschedule is compared to a schedule generated by the Rubus-ICE industrial tool suite.The obtained results show that the proposed method is applicable to a potentially widerange of abstract systems with dierent requirements. The limitations of the methodare also discussed and potential future work is debated based on these results.