A network calculus model for SpaceWire networks

Abstract

SpaceWire is a wormhole network standard scheduled to be used as the sole on-board network for future satellites by the ESA. As the network will be shared by real-time and non real-time traffic, network designers require a tool to check that temporal constraints are verified for all the urgent messages. Existing work on wormhole networks has focused either on wormhole network with built-in real-time mechanisms or on best-effort wormhole NoCs with use cases very different from those of SpaceWire. In this paper, we propose a model for a best-effort wormhole network based on Network Calculus theory that properly models the behavior of a SpaceWire network thanks to a new network element, the Wormhole Section.