Providing efficient support for real-time guarantees in a fibre-optic AWG-based network for embedded systems

High-performance embedded systems running real-time applications demand communication solutions providing high data rates and low error probabilities, properties inherent to optical solutions. However, providing timing guarantees for deadline bound applications in this context is far from basic due to the parallelism inherent in multiwavelength networks and often bound to include a large amount of pessimism. Assuming deterministic medium access, an admission control algorithm using a schedulability analysis can ensure deadline guarantees for real-time communication. The traffic dependency analysis presented in this paper is specifically targeting a multichannel context, taking into consideration the possibility of concurrent transmissions in these types of networks. Combining our analysis with a feasibility analysis in admission control, the amount of guaranteed hard real-time traffic could be shown to increase by a factor 7 in a network designed for a radar signal processing case. Using this combination of analysis methods will render possible an increased amount of hard real-time traffic over a given multichannel network, leading to a more efficient bandwidth utilization by deadline dependent applications without having to redesign the network or the medium access method.