TABLE OF CONTENTS Embedded real-time systems have to be designed such that they implement correctly the required functionality. In addition, they have to fulfil a wide range of competing constraints: development cost, unit cost, reliability, security, size, performance, power consumption, flexibility, time-to-market, maintainability, correctness, safety, etc. Very important for the correct functioning of such systems are their timing constraints: the correctness of the system behaviour depends not only on the logical results of the computations, but also on the physical instant at which these results are produced [1].
Real-time systems have been classified as hard real-time and soft real-time systems [1]. Basically, hard real-time systems are systems where failing to meet a timing constraint can potentially have catastrophic consequences. For example, a brake-by-wire system in a car failing to react within a given time interval can result in a fatal accident. On the other hand, a multi-media system, which is a soft real-time system, can, under certain circumstances, tolerate a certain amount of delays resulting maybe in a patchier picture, without serious consequences besides some possible inconvenience to the user.
Many real-time applications, following physical, modularity or safetyconstraints, are implemented using distributed architectures . Such systems are composed of several different types of hardware components, interconnected in a network. For such systems, the communication between the functions implemented on different nodes has an important impact on the overall system properties such as performance, cost, maintainability, etc.
The analysis and optimisation approaches presented are aimed...
