Reducing WCET overestimations in multi-thread loops with critical section usage

Abstract

Worst-case execution time (WCET) is an important metric in real-time systems that helps in energy usage modeling and predefined execution time requirement evaluation. While basic timing analysis relies on execution path identification and its length evaluation, multi-thread code with critical section usage brings additional complications and requires analysis of resource-waiting time estimation. In this paper, we solve a problem of worst-case execution time overestimation reduction in situations when multiple threads are executing loops with the same critical section usage in each iteration. The experiment showed the worst-case execution time does not take into account the proportion between computational and critical sections; therefore, we proposed a new worst-case execution time calculation model to reduce the overestimation. The proposed model results prove to reduce the overestimation on average by half in comparison to the theoretical model. Therefore, this leads to more accurate execution time and energy consumption estimation.