The objective of this book is to provide the system designer with means (on the methodology and tools levels) to estimate systems performances and evaluate rapidly and very early the design decisions in the SoC design flow. Our work provides contributions in two main aspects: (1) On the Conceptual Level, we defined (using the UML meta-modeling concepts) modeling concepts to estimate shared resources impact on systems overall performances, by introducing the "virtual node" concept for scheduling and shared resources access control. Furthermore, we introduced the "Communication Pattern" concept...