Work-in-Progress: A Flattened Priority Framework for Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems

Zonghui Li, Hai Wan, Yangdong Deng, Ming Gu

Abstract: Recent years witnessed a fast growing popularity of mixed-criticality real-time applications on smart devices. Priority schedulers are typically the central component to provide differential quality of service (QoS) for mixed-criticality tasks. The increasing deployment of such applications on smart devices, however, poses new challenges for the design of effective schedulers. First, the scheduling algorithms for mixed-criticality tasks are generally NP-complete. Second, the scheduling algorithms have to be effective enough under the limited computing resource of smart devices. This paper presents a work-in-progress report on a novel technique to design efficient and effective mixed-criticality schedulers. We propose a flattened priority framework to transform a non-priority scheduler into a priority one. The framework is typically a iterative framework based on feedback loops. Given an optimal nonpriority scheduler, for P priorities, the transformed scheduler converges with P iterations in the worst case. With the proposed framework, the design of priority schedulers is simplified into the design of non-priority schedulers. Such a simplification dramatically lowers the design effort and system complexity. A case study was performed on FPGA-based Industrial Ethernet switches. The proposed method achieves a 30%~50% reduction in the usage of look-up tables (LUTs) without performance loss.

External IDs:dblp:conf/rtas/LiWD018