Worst-case end-to-end delays evaluation for SpaceWire networks

SpaceWire is a standard for on-board satellite networks chosen by the ESA as the basis for multiplexing payload and control traffic on future data-handling architectures. However, network designers need tools to ensure that the network is able to deliver critical messages on time. Current research fails to address this needs for SpaceWire networks. On one hand, many papers only seek to determine probabilistic results for end-to-end delays on Wormhole networks like SpaceWire. This does not provide sufficient guarantee for critical traffic. On the other hand, a few papers give methods to determine maximum latencies on wormhole networks that, unlike SpaceWire, have dedicated real-time mechanisms built-in. Thus, in this paper, we propose an appropriate method to compute an upper-bound on the worst-case end-to-end delay of a packet in a SpaceWire network.