Scheduling and Communication Synthesis for Distributed Real-Time Systems

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ARE now omnipresent: from cellular phones to pagers, from microwave ovens to PDAs, almost all the devices we use are controlled by embedded systems. Many embedded systems have to fulfill strict requirements in terms of performance and cost efficiency. Emerging designs are usually based on heterogeneous architectures that integrate multiple programmable processors and dedicated hardware components. New tools which extend design automation to system level have to support the integrated design of both the hardware and software components of such systems. This thesis concentrates on aspects of scheduling and communication for embedded real-time systems. Special emphasis has been placed on the impact of the communication infrastructure and protocol on the overall system performance. The scheduling and communication strategies proposed are based on an abstract graph representation which captures, at process level, both the dataflow and the flow of control. We have considere..