The single-path approach towards WCET-analysable software

This paper presents a strategy for generating real-time code that is highly temporally predictable which, in turn, makes WCET analysis trivial. The core of this strategy is the single-path software/hardware architecture. Single-path programs run on processors that support a conditional move instruction with a constant execution time, and, as the name says, these programs only have a single execution path. The paper demonstrates how single-path code can be generated out of any WCET-analysable code, thus providing a general solution to get around the complexity of WCET analysis. Our work also introduces the WCET-oriented programming style that, if used together with single-path programming, yields not only deterministic but also very competitive code execution times.