Ensuring Deterministic Timing in a Federated GNSS Correction Pipeline with Lingua Franca
For developers of embedded real-time systems, this work demonstrates a practical method to achieve deterministic timing in distributed pipelines that are typically considered asynchronous.
The paper presents a federated GNSS correction-data pipeline using Lingua Franca that achieves deterministic timing, validated by runtime logs showing reproducible interrupt cadence and jitter profiles.
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.