Latency Evaluation of SDFGs on Heterogeneous Processors Using Timed Automata

Abstract

Synchronous Data Flow (SDF) is a graphical computation model used for analyzing digital signal processing and real time multimedia applications. In general, these applications have two primary performance metrics - throughput and latency. Latency is important in multimedia processing applications such as video-conferencing, Internet telephony and games since latency surpassing a specific limit results in poor quality of service (QoS). Past work had focused on computing the latency of SDF graphs on homogeneous multiprocessor platforms. In this paper, we present an approach to compute the latency of a static schedule for a given unfolding factor with an optimal throughput for an SDF graph on a heterogeneous multiprocessor platform using timed automata. We use timed automata as a semantic model to represent the system model, which includes a synchronous data flow graph and an execution platform. We use the UPPAAL model-checker to specify the resulting network of timed automata and compute the latency.