Evaluation and Optimisation of Communication Performance in a Hybrid Measurement and Control System

Jacek AUGUSTYN, Andrzej TUTAJ
AGH University of Science and Technology
al. A. Mickiewicza 30, 30 059 Krakow, Poland
jag@agh.edu.pl; tutaj@agh.edu.pl

Abstract: In a modern hybrid measurement and control system a high speed data acquisition/execution module communicates with a master management and control unit. A typical solution may involve a System on Chip (SoC) device, like ARM Cortex M core based microcontroller, linked via USB bus with a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) appliance, such as a tablet, a smartphone, or a PDA. During prototyping stage the COTS is usually temporarily substituted with a PC computer running a rapid prototyping tool such as MATLAB. The paper presents software design considerations and discusses the results of extensive experiments conducted in order to assess if such a prototyping configuration is able to provide a kind of real time communication performance comparable to that expected in the target system. An optimisation technique is proposed that considerably improves statistics of throughput, round trip time and packet exchanged frequency and that utilises standard operating system software components.

Keywords: soft real time, embedded system, microcontroller, USB interface, MATLAB.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Jacek AUGUSTYN, Andrzej TUTAJ, Evaluation and Optimisation of Communication Performance in a Hybrid Measurement and Control System, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 23 (4), pp. 341-351, 2014. https://doi.org/10.24846/v23i4y201404