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

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.