EMSBench: Benchmark and Testbed for Reactive Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Benchmark suites for real-time embedded systems (RTES) usually contain only pure computations that are often used in this domain. They allow to evaluate computing performance, but do not reproduce the complexity and behaviour that is typical for such systems. Actual RTES have to interact with the physical environment, which is often reflected by code that is executed concurrently. In this article, we present the software package EMSBench that mimics such complex behaviour, and highlight some of its use cases. The benchmark code ems of EMSBench is based on the open-source engine management system (EMS) FreeEMS. Additionally, EMSBench contains a trace generator (tg) that provides input signals for ems and enables to execute ems close to reality. We provide detailed descriptions of the ems's execution behaviour and of trace generation. EMSBench can be used as test or benchmark program to compare different hardware platforms, e.g. in terms of schedulability. Also, we use EMSBench as a benchmark for static worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis and compare these results to measurements performed on existing hardware. Our results based on the OTAWA WCET estimation tool show WCET overestimations by the static analysis from 11.9% to 41.1% depending on the complexity of the analysed functions.

Keywords

• real-time benchmark
• wcet analysis
• engine management system