Hardware-accelerated analysis of real-time Networks-on-Chip

A real-time Network-on-Chip (NoC) must guarantee that it is able to execute a set of tasks and deliver the communication packets that they generate, all within the respective deadlines even under a worst-case scenario. End-to-End Response Time Analysis (E2ERTA) is a mathematical formulation that can be used to test whether a particular NoC configuration is able to guarantee the timely execution of tasks and delivery packets. The complexity of E2ERTA calculation increases with the increase of the number of tasks and packet flows, and with the core count of the NoC. This paper presents an approach to accelerate E2ERTA calculations through the use of custom hardware and efficient implementation of its mathematical operations. We explore the performance of the proposed approach, and analyse its effectiveness against the state-of-the-art in the field. The results show a significant improvement in testing NoC guarantees, thus potentially enabling the use of E2ERTA as a fast and guaranteed deterministic admission controller for open and dynamic real-time systems. As a case-study, we integrate the proposed approach to a NoC optimisation framework aiming to accelerate the search for NoC configurations that meet all the NoC's hard real-time requirements.