  Simulations and runtime measurements are some of the methods which can be
used to evaluate whether a given NoC-based platform can accommodate application
workload and fulfil its timing requirements. Yet, these techniques are often
time-consuming, and hence can evaluate only a limited set of scenarios.
Therefore, these approaches are not suitable for safety-critical and hard
real-time systems, where one of the fundamental requirements is to provide
strong guarantees that all timing requirements will always be met, even in the
worst-case conditions. For such systems the analytic-based real-time analysis
is the only viable approach.
  In this paper the focus is on the real-time communication analysis for
wormhole-switched priority-preemptive NoCs. First, we elaborate on the existing
analysis and identify one source of pessimism. Then, we propose an extension to
the analysis, which efficiently overcomes this limitation, and allows for a
less pessimistic analysis. Finally, through a comprehensive experimental
evaluation, we compare the newly proposed approach against the existing one,
and also observe how the trends change with different traffic parameters.
