Ensuring Deterministic Timing in a Federated GNSS Correction Pipeline with Lingua Franca

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This work addresses timing uncertainty in embedded systems arising from the coupling of hardware interrupts, buffering mechanisms, and distributed communication. The paper proposes a federated GNSS correction data pipeline based on Lingua Franca, introducing explicit logical time semantics to this domain for the first time. It unifies the modeling of interrupt ticks, ring buffer evolution, and physical-logical jitter within a coherent framework. By integrating a time-triggered GNSS receiver, UART interrupt stream modeling, FIFO buffer analysis, and a federated execution architecture, the approach enables analyzable and predictable end-to-end timing behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that the pipeline achieves deterministic and reproducible timing performance.

Abstract

Embedded systems that combine hardware interrupts, buffering, and distributed communication are often perceived as inherently asynchronous and difficult to analyze. However, such systems can exhibit a deterministic timing structure when modeled using explicit logical-time semantics. This paper presents a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) correction-data pipeline implemented as a federated Lingua Franca (LF) application. The federated LF program decomposes the end-to-end pipeline into reactors with explicit time semantics, including a time-triggered GNSS receiver, a UART interrupt stream derived from baud rate and First-In First-Out (FIFO) buffer characteristics, a periodic forwarding task, and downstream processing with jitter monitoring. Federated execution and runtime logs validate the analytically derived deterministic timing structure-including interrupt cadence, ring-buffer evolution, packetization behavior, and physical--logical jitter-yielding a reproducible and predictable timing profile.

Problem

• Deterministic Timing
• Federated Systems
• GNSS Correction
• Logical Time
• Embedded Systems

Innovation

• Deterministic Timing
• Lingua Franca
• Federated Execution
• Logical Time Semantics
• GNSS Correction Pipeline