Timing analysis of interrupt-driven programs under context bounds

Timing analysis is a key step in the design of dependable real-time embedded systems, yet existing analysis tools do not work well for interrupt-driven code, which is commonly used in embedded systems. In this paper, we present a technique for timing analysis of interrupt-driven software. We show that for systems that use priority pre-emptive scheduling, if there is a finite arrival time between interrupts, one can use bounds on the number of context switches to perform timing analysis. Our work builds upon prior work on timing analysis for sequential programs. We present empirical evidence to show that we can accurately predict the execution time along any path of an interrupt-driven program on a standard micro-controller.