Conforming the runtime inputs for hard real-time embedded systems

Timing is an important concern when designing an embedded system. While lots of researches on hard real-time systems focus on design-time analysis, monitoring the corresponding runtime behaviors are seldom investigated. In this paper, we investigate the conformity problem for runtime inputs of a hard real-time system. We adopt the widely used arrival curve model which captures the worst/best-cases event arrivals in the time interval domain and propose an algorithm to on-the-fly evaluate the conformity of the system input w.r.t. given arrival curves. The developed algorithm is lightweight in terms of both computation and memory overheads, which is particularly suitable for resource-constrained embedded systems. We also provide proofs and an FPGA implementation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.