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

摘要

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.