Schedulability and end-to-end latency in distributed ECU networks

Abstract

Embedded control systems in automobiles are typically implemented by a set of tasks deployed on multiple Electronic Control Units (ECUs) communicating via one or more buses like CAN or FlexRay. In the case of safety-critical systems, there are hard real-time bounds on the (i) response times of tasks/messages, and (ii) end-to-end latencies of certain task/message chains. These depend on various factors like the number of tasks (and messages) involved in the processing (and communication) sequence, parameters of these tasks/messages, scheduling policies, communication protocols, clock drifts, etc. Moreover, since the data transfer among tasks/messages is typically via asynchronous buffers that are overwritable and sticky, multiple semantics are possible for end-to-end latency. Hence, precise estimation of response times and end-to-end latencies in embedded systems is a non-trivial problem.