Abstract
The research field of system partitioning in modern electronic system design started to find
strong advertence of scientists about fifteen years ago. Since a multitude of formulations for
the partitioning problem exist, the same multitude could be found in the number of strategies
that address this problem. Their feasibility is highly dependent on the platform abstraction and
the degree of realism that it features. This work originated from the intention to identify the
most mature and powerful approaches for system partitioning in order to integrate them into a
consistent design framework for wireless embedded systems. Within this publication, a thorough
characterisation of graph properties typical for task graphs in the field of wireless embedded
system design has been undertaken and has led to the development of an entirely new approach for
the system partitioning problem. The restricted range exhaustive search algorithm is introduced
and compared to popular and well-reputed heuristic techniques based on tabu search, genetic
algorithm, and the global criticality/local phase algorithm. It proves superior performance for
a set of system graphs featuring specific properties found in human-made task graphs, since it
exploits their typical characteristics such as locality, sparsity, and their degree of parallelism.