Modeling technique for simulation time speed-up of performance computation in transaction level models

Modeling embedded systems at transaction level facilitates the architecting of hardware and software resources according to non-functional requirements. Raising the level of abstraction, Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) represents a good compromise between modeling accuracy and simulation speed. However, in complex pipelined architectures, the efficiency of exploration and performance evaluation is limited by the number of involved transactions and by the various non-functional properties to assess. In this paper we propose a technique to improve the creation of transaction level models and the description of properties related to resources of the system architecture. This technique is based on the separation of concerns between the evolution of a system model at transaction level and the computation of non-functional properties. The considered case study is a wireless communication receiver based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) protocol. The proposed technique is used to evaluate the related computing complexity according to various system configurations.