Compositional performance analysis with improved analysis techniques for obtaining viable end-to-end latencies in distributed embedded systems

To give worst case guarantees for the timing behavior of complex distributed embedded real-time systems, e.g. end-to-end latencies, different compositional approaches for system-level performance analysis have been developed which exhibit great flexibility and scalability. While these approaches are in theory able to handle arbitrary complex systems, the system-level results can easily become very pessimistic with increasing numbers of components. In this article, the basic principles of compositional system-level analysis are explained and its inherent strengths and weaknesses are elaborated. Furthermore, we present improved analysis techniques from existing research which can greatly reduce the pessimism of the system-level analysis results. Two techniques will be discussed in detail: the exploitation of a system’s communication infrastructure by usage of composition and decomposition operators and the exploitation of information w.r.t. the correlation of event processing. These techniques help to make system-level analysis not only applicable, but also a highly useful technique in the integration phase of embedded system design.