Measurement-based timing analysis

Abstract

In this paper we present a measurement-based worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis method. Exhaustive end-to-end execution-time measurements are computationally intractable in most cases. Therefore, we propose to measure execution times of subparts of the application code and then compose these times into a safe WCET bound. This raises a number of challenges to be solved. First, there is the question of how to define and subsequently calculate adequate subparts. Second, a huge amount of test data is required enforcing the execution of selected paths to perform the desired runtime measurements. The presented method provides solutions to both problems. In a number of experiments we show the usefulness of the theoretical concepts and the practical feasibility by using current state-of-the-art industrial case studies from project partners. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.