"Vehicle to Grid" power or V2G will be a new green energy scheme that allows electricity to flow from Electric Vehicles (EVs) to power lines. The objective of this paper is to design and develop a secure wireless communication platform for V2G research, with the aim to develop a suitable wireless test bed for the V2G in Singapore. First, this paper presents our system block diagram and required methods design which include V2G architecture design, integrated OBU (on-board unit) design, base station (Aggregator), Telematics, V2G authentication protocol, and schedule optimization of EVs against Grid conditions. It then focuses on the authentication protocol for secure wireless communications between the Aggregators and EVs. It addresses the new and special challenges related to EVs, such as large overhead and latency, which are crucial for secure wireless communications with dynamic and fast moving EVs. Finally, the paper presents the initial test results and shows that our authentication protocol can securely protect the exchanged information with less overhead and less authentication latency.

Software-controlled scratchpad memory is increasingly employed in embedded systems as it offers better timing predictability compared to caches. Previous scratchpad allocation algorithms typically consider single-process applications. But embedded applications are mostly multitasking with real-time constraints, where the scratchpad memory space has to be shared among interacting processes that may preempt each other. In this work, we develop a novel dynamic scratchpad allocation technique that takes these process interferences into account to improve the performance and predictability of the memory system. We model the application as a Message Sequence Chart (MSC) to best capture the interprocess interactions. Our goal is to optimize the Worst-Case Response Time (WCRT) of the application through runtime reloading of the scratchpad memory content at appropriate execution points. We propose an iterative allocation algorithm that consists of two critical steps: (1) analyze the MSC along with the existing allocation to determine potential interference patterns, and (2) exploit this interference information to tune the scratchpad reloading points and content so as to best improve the WCRT. We present various alternative scratchpad allocation heuristics and evaluate their effectiveness in reducing the WCRT. The scheme is also extended to work on Message Sequence Graph models. We evaluate our memory allocation scheme on two real-world embedded applications controlling an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an in-orbit monitoring instrument, respectively.

Memory accesses form an important source of timing unpredictability. Timing analysis of real-time embedded software thus requires bounding the time for memory accesses. Multiprocessing, a popular approach for performance enhancement, opens up the opportunity for concurrent execution. However due to contention for any shared memory by different processing cores, memory access behavior becomes more unpredictable, and hence harder to analyze. In this paper, we develop a timing analysis method for concurrent software running on multi-cores with a shared instruction cache. Communication across tasks is by message passing where the message mailboxes are accessed via interrupt service routines. We do not handle data cache, shared memory synchronization and code sharing across tasks. Our method progressively improves the lifetime estimates of tasks that execute concurrently on multiple cores, in order to estimate potential conflicts in the shared cache. Possible conflicts arising from overlapping task lifetimes are accounted for in the hit-miss classification of accesses to the shared cache, to provide safe execution time bounds. We show that our method produces lower worst-case response time (WCRT) estimates than existing shared-cache analysis on a real-world embedded application.

Multi-core architectures consisting of multiple processing cores on a chip have become increasingly prevalent. Synthesizing hard real-time applications onto these platforms is quite challenging, as the contention among the cores for various shared resources leads to inherent timing unpredictability. This paper proposes the use of shared cache in a predictable manner through a combination of locking and partitioning mechanisms. We explore possible design choices and evaluate their effects on the worst-case application performance. Our study reveals certain design principles that strongly dictate the performance of a predictable memory hierarchy.

Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) is an integrated circuit containing multiple instruction-set processors on a single chip that implements most of the functionality of a complex electronic system. An MPSoC architecture is, in general, customized for an embedded application. A critical component of this customization process is the on-chip memory system configuration. Embedded systems increasingly employ software-controlled scratchpad memory(SPM) due to its inherent advantages in terms of area, energy, and timing predictability compared to caches. An application-specific flexible partitioning of the on-chip SPM budget among the processors is critical for performance optimization. Moreover, scheduling the tasks of an application on to the processors and partitioning the SPM are inter-dependent even though these steps are decoupled in the traditional design space exploration process. In this work, we design an integrated task mapping, scheduling, SPM partitioning, and data allocation technique based on Integer Linear Programming(ILP)formulation. Our ILP formulation explores the optimal performance limit and shows that integrated task schedul-ing and SPM optimization improves performance by up to 80% for embedded applications.

10.1145/1146909.1147002

Scratchpad memory is a popular choice for on-chip storage in real-time embedded systems. The allocation of code/data to scratchpad memory is performed at compile time leading to predictable memory access latencies. Current scratchpad memory allocation techniques improve the average-case execution time of tasks. For hard real-time systems, on the other hand, worst case execution time (WCET) is a key metric. In this paper, we propose scratchpad allocation techniques for data memory that aim to minimize a task's WCET. We first develop an integer linear programming (ILP) based solution which constructs the optimal allocation assuming that all program paths are feasible. Next, we employ branch-and-bound search to more accurately construct the optimal allocation by exploiting infeasible path information. However, the branch-and-bound search is too time-consuming in practice. Therefore, we design fast heuristic searches that achieve near-optimal allocations for all our benchmarks