Experience with Hardware-Software Codesign of Network Protocol Stacks Supporting Real-Time Inter-Task Communication

In this paper, we consider a major problem in the hardware-software codesign of network protocol stacks for real-time embedded systems, which is related to the time-bounded packet delivery channel that guarantees the deadlines of tasks, as well as the timely delivery of packets exchanged between hardware and software tasks. This paper presents a technique to integrate a real-time packet delivery channel into hardware-software codesign of network protocol stacks. The experimental evaluation showed that the proposed technique yielded efficient performance in terms of the minimal deadline miss ratio of real-time packets and fast response of aperiodic packets.