A Tool for Performance Estimation of Networked Embedded End-Systems - Design Automation Conference, 1998. Proceedings

Networked embedded systems are expected to support adaptive streaming audiohideo applications with soji real-time constraints. These systems can be designed in a cost efficient manner only if their architecture exploits the “leads” suggested by clever compiletime performance estimators. However; performance estimation of networked embedded systems is a non-trivial problem. The computational requirements of such systems show statistical variations that stem from several interacting factors. At the slowest time scale, applications can adapt to network bandwidth by configuring the processing functionality of their tasks (e.g. compression parameters). Also, there could be sign@cant execution time variations within a task. Thus, it is tricky to compute the net processing demand of several such applications on a system architecture, especially if the system schedules these applications using prioritized run-time schedulers. In this paper; we describe an analytical tool called Asap for fast pe$ormance estimation of such embedded systems. Asap builds approximate models of these systems and characterizes the processing load on the system as a stochastic process. The output of Asap is an exact distribution of the processing delay of each application. This is a powerful result that can be leveraged for efficient design of multimedia networked systems requiring sofi real-time guarantees. It is also the first known framework that quantiJ5es the efSect of runtime schedulers (FCFS, RM, EDF) on the pe~ormance of such systems.