Survey of Cache analysis for worst-case execution time estimation

The main task of real-time system design is to analyze the timing behaviors of a system at design time in order to guarantee that the given timing constraints are met at run time. The key issue is to estimate the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of a program. Typically the WCET is heavily influenced by the hardware features of the target processor, among which Cache is the most influential factor. This article presents a survey on Cache analysis for WCET estimation. It introduces main research problems and challenges in different dimensions, such as the analysis of loops, data caches, multi-level caches, multi-core shared caches, non-LRU replacement policies, etc. The mainstream analysis techniques with their pros and cons are evaluated. An outlook for future research directions of Cache analysis is given in the end.