MAESTRO: A time-driven embedded testbed Architecture with Event-driven Synchronization

In the product development life-cycle of hard-real-time embedded systems, software verification plays a very important role. During verification, a Hardware-In-Loop (HIL) testbed is used to test the key properties of the software, namely, schedulability, concurrency and timeliness, by exercising and monitoring the interfaces of the Design Under Test (DUT). Often, building a testbed to test these properties can be challenging and costly. For the first time, this paper proposes a Modular Architecture with Event-driven Synchronization and Time-driven Real-time Operations (MAESTRO) for a low-cost testbed, to support HIL and system testing. Our proposed MAESTRO-based testbed is compared with other testbeds and is shown to provide superior performance. Finally, the paper also defines key properties essential for building a robust embedded testbed.