Semantics-Preserving Implementation of Synchronous Specifications Over Dynamic TDMA Distributed Architectures

We propose a technique to automatically synthesize programs and schedules for hard real-time distributed (embedded) systems from synchronous data-flow models. Our technique connects the SynDEx scheduling tool and the Network Code toolchain in a seamless flow of automatic model transformations that go all the way from specification to implementation. Our contribution is the non-trivial connection between the models manipulated by SynDEx and by the Network Code toolchain, at both formal and tool level. We provide an algorithm for converting the data-dependent schedule tables output by SynDEx into Network Code programs which can be seen as an ‘‘assembly code’’ level for time-driven distributed real-time systems. The main difficulty is to ensure the preservation of both functionality and the real-time guarantees computed by SynDEx in the presence of clock drifts (which are abstracted away in the scheduling model of SynDEx). Existing tools can convert the resulting Network Code programs into software and hardware-accelerated execution units.