Trade-off between accuracy and tractability of network calculus in FIFO networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a linear programming algorithm for computing deterministic performance bounds in FIFO networks, balancing accuracy and tractability, applicable to both tree and cyclic topologies.

Contribution

It presents a novel linear programming approach that generalizes to arbitrary FIFO network topologies, including cyclic dependencies, improving performance bound computation.

Findings

Effective in tree and cyclic FIFO networks

Balances accuracy and computational complexity

Validated on toy and real network topologies

Abstract

Computing accurate deterministic performance bounds is a strong need for communication technologies having strong requirements on latency and reliability. Beyond new scheduling protocols such as TSN, the FIFO policy remains at work within each class of communication. In this paper, we focus on computing deterministic performance bounds in FIFO networks in the network calculus framework. We propose a new algorithm based on linear programming that presents a trade-off between accuracy and tractability. This algorithm is first presented for tree networks. In a second time, we generalize our approach and present a linear program for computing performance bounds for arbitrary topologies, including cyclic dependencies. Finally, we provide numerical results, both of toy examples and real topologies, to assess the interest of our approach.