In 2007, I received an engineer degree from the ENSIMAG and a Master Degree “Systems and Software” from University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.

From November 2007 to February 2012, I have been a PhD student at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France. I received the PhD degree from the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace on March, 2nd 2012.

The title of my thesis is : “Controlling network latencies in on-board SpaceWire networks”.

Abstract:

“The SpaceWire network standard is promoted by the ESA and is scheduled to be used as the sole on-board network for future satellites. SpaceWire uses a wormhole routing mechanism to reduce memory consumption and the associated costs. However, wormhole routing can lead to packet blocking in routers which creates large variations in end-to-end delays. 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 critical messages. The metric we chose for this tool is an upper-bound on the worst-case end-to-end delay of a packet traversing a SpaceWire network. This metric is simpler to compute than the exact delay of each packet and provide enough guarantee to the network designers.

During the thesis, we designed three methods to compute this upper-bound. The three methods use different assumptions and have different advantages and drawbacks. On the one hand, the first two methods are very general and do not require strong assumptions on the input traffic. On the other hand, the third method requires more specific assumptions on the input traffic. Thus, it is less general but usually gives tighter bounds than the two other methods.

In the thesis, we apply those methods to a case study provided by Thales Alenia Space and compare the results. We also compare the three methods on several smaller networks to study the impact of various parameters on their results.”

My PhD advisors were Christian Fraboul (IRIT) and Fabrice Frances (ISAE).

Contact Information

Mail: tferrand AT fastmail DOT fm

Resume : resume.pdf