Property-Driven Timestamps Encoding for Timeprints-Based Tracing and Monitoring

Abstract

Timeprints are temporal regularly-logged signatures, describing a signal’s temporal behavior. They have been recently used in on-chip signals tracing and temporal properties checking. Timeprints are generated by aggregations of encoded timestamps marking where signal changes took place. This paper describes different timestamps encoding mechanisms, and shows how some system’s temporal properties can be used to create more efficient timestamps. The efficiency of a timestamps-encoding is introduced in terms of the number of collisions in the timeprints-reconstruction solution space. We show how using property-based timestamps encoding reduces the number of such collisions, leading to better chances capturing unexpected behaviors.