A New Approach to Determine Number of Loop Iterations for WCET Analysis

Estimation of program execution time is of great importance for development of real time systems. One of the major ingredients affecting the execution time of a program code is the number of loop iterations. In this paper a new approach to determine the number of loop iterations is presented. This is achieved by building symbolic expressions to represent iteration conditions and state change of the loop counters across each of loop iteration path. These expressions are then evaluated to determine the number of the loop iterations. The result of analysis on the Mälardalen benchmark suite reveals the accuracy of the proposed approach.