Context-sensitivity in IPET for measurement-based timing analysis

The Implicit Path Enumeration Technique (IPET) has become widely accepted as a powerful technique to compute upper bounds on the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of time-critical software components. While the technique works fine whenever fixed execution times can be assumed for the atomic program parts, standard IPET does not consider the context-dependence of execution times. As a result, the obtained WCET bounds can often be overly pessimistic. The issue of context-dependence has previously been addressed in the field of static timing analysis, where context-dependent execution times of program parts can be extracted from a hardware model. In the case of measurement-based execution time analysis, however, contexts must be derived from timed execution traces. In the present extended abstract we present an overview of our work on the automatic detection and exploitation of context dependencies from timed execution traces. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.