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Microprocessors and microcontrollers are now widely used in automobiles. Microprocessor systems contain sources of interrupt and interrupt service routines, which are software components executed in response to the assertion of an interrupt in hardware. A major problem in designing the software of microprocessor systems is the analytical treatment of interrupt latency. Because multiple interrupt service routines are executed on the same CPU, they compete for the CPU and interfere with each other's latency requirements. Here, interrupt latency is defined as the delay between the assertion of the interrupt in hardware and the start of execution of the associated interrupt service routine. It is estimated that 80% of intermittent bugs in small microprocessor software loads are due to improper treatment of interrupts. Until this work, there is no analytic method for analyzing a particular system to determine if it may violate interrupt latency requirements.

The study done by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that developing automotive collision warning and avoidance systems will be very effective in order to significantly reduce fatalities, injuries and associated costs. In order to develop an automotive collision warning and avoidance system, it will be necessary that the vehicles should be able to exchange (in real-time) their dynamic information such as speed, acceleration, direction, relative position, status of some devices like brake, steering wheel, gas pedal, etc. The only feasible way to exchange the vehicles’ dynamic information will be through the use of wireless communication technology. However, the wireless link setup time and communication latencies should be under certain bounds so that the vehicles can appropriately react on time to avoid collisions. This paper will present results from an experimental setup that simulates inter-vehicle communications.