Real-Time Communication for Multicore Systems with Multi-domain Ring Buses

We address the problem of scheduling real-time data transactions on a multicore processor bus. In particular, to in-crease system predictability and tighten WCET estimation, we propose to employ a software-controllable Multi-Domain Ring Bus (MDRB) architecture. The problem of scheduling periodic real-time transactions on MDRB is challenging because the bus allows multiple non-overlapping transactions to be executed concurrently, and because the degree of concurrency depends on the topology of the bus and of executed transactions. We propose a practical abstraction mechanism for the scheduling problem together with two novel scheduling algorithms. The first algorithm is optimal for transaction sets under restrictive assumptions while the second one induces a competitive sufficient schedulable utilization bound for more general transaction sets.