Mixed-criticality NoC partitioning based on the NoCDepend dependability technique

Abstract

The deployment of mixed-criticality applications on NoC (Network-on-Chip)-based MPSoC (Multiprocessor Systemon-Chip) platforms requires a stringent protection of the communication and processing resources being utilized by hard-realtime parts of the the application in order to avoid interference of less critical application parts. In this contribution we present an approach for encapsulation of critical NoC communication resources, which guarantees no interference of non-critical data packets with critical communication data on the network. It is shown, how the NoC fault-tolerance technique "NoCDepend" can be used in order to achieve partitioning of a NoC into several criticality domains without additional overhead. The shape of the protected domains is arbitrary and the method can be applied to 2D and 3D NoCs.

A Design That Incorporates Adaptive Reservation into Mixed-Criticality Systems

“…Figure 24 indicates the overhead caused by the overload handling service in Evaluation 3. Concluded from Figures 16,17,18,19,20,21, and 24, the overall overhead caused by all the services will not be greater than 2% of processor resource in the worst case.…”

“…In general, three fundamental research issues are considered important: the resource isolation, the resource distribution and sharing among the isolated parts, and the balance between isolation and sharing. A wide range of resource kinds are involved in these topics, including power and energy [3][4][5][6][7][8], communication bus and memory access [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], and processor usage in both the singleand multiprocessors platforms.…”

A Survey of Research into Mixed Criticality Systems

“…Response-time analysis, already available for such protocols [Shi and Burns 2008], is augmented to allow the size and frequency of traffic to be criticality dependent. Wormhole routing is also used by Hollstein et al [2015] to provide complete separation of mixed-criticality code; they also support run-time adaptability following any fault identified by a Built-In Self Test.…”

Providing Integrity in Real-Time Networks-on-Chip

“…Research has explored fault tolerance both in the link layer [16], [17] and in the network layer [18]- [24]. Moreover, approaches focus on different types of random hardware faults: transient and intermittent faults [16]- [19]; permanent faults [24]; or both [20]- [23]. Comprehensive overviews are found in [25] and [26].…”

“…Regarding fault-tolerance, beside the aforementioned resilient NoC [4], [9], another work has recently addressed mixedcritical NoCs, albeit considering only permanent faults. Mixedcritical partitioning is employed in [24] to circumvent faulty routers, which are detected by a built-in self-test.…”