Predicting Timing Behavior In Architectural Design Exploration Of Real-Time Embedded Systems

The degree of flexibility of a real-time system architecture indicates the capability of the system to tolerate perturbations in timing related specifications. Flexibility is also an important factor in the trade-off studies between cost and performance. In this paper, we identify the need for a flexibility metric and show that the existing real-time analysis results cannot be directly used as such a metric. We formulate new metrics and illustrate their effectiveness in comparing the flexibility of different system architectures