Simulation of a Heterogeneous System at Multiple Levels of Abstraction Using Rendezvous Based Modeling

As the complexity of modern systems grow, the level of abstraction of their descriptions must similarly increase, as evidenced by the growing shift towards Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). While these methodologies are useful in abstracting the complexity of the computation, their lack of a formal foundation for representing concurrency makes the modeling of complex communication patterns difficult. In this paper, we examine the benefit of using a formal, rendezvous based communication methodology to model the transaction level. By allowing flexible composition of rendezvous and synchronous dataflow through rendezvous, this methodology is capable of modeling a wide variety of communication patterns and modeling styles. This modeling methodology is used to model a transaction level component in a heterogeneous system consisting of components at different abstraction levels.