Communication Modeling for System-Level Performance-Simulation

Early in the design-cycle of hardware-systems, details about data-formats, interfaces and the behavior of system components are not available. Nonetheless, choices between design alternatives, depending on given constraints, must be made. To support this process, simulation-models are used to determine the system-performance. In this work, an approach for modeling communication-structures for an EQN-based method, as introduced in previous work, is given. The approach employs component patterns to reduce the complexity of interfaces, while easing the composition of highly performant systems. As we show with the example of a FlexRay¿-bus-model, the proposed method fosters the assembly of simulation-models from coarse grained system component patterns, while it still allows to obtain detailed performance simulation results. Despite a high abstraction level, the full functionality can be specified with the proposed approach. This paper provides the modeling of components with Extended Queuing Networks(EQN) and a discussion of a fully parameterizable FlexRay¿-bus-model, taken from the automotive domain.