Restart-Based Fault-Tolerance: System Design and Schedulability Analysis

Embedded systems in safety-critical environments are continuously required to deliver more performance and functionality, while expected to provide verified safety guarantees. Nonetheless, platform-wide software verification (required for safety) is often expensive. Therefore, design methods that enable utilization of components such as real-time operating systems (RTOS), without requiring their correctness to guarantee safety, is necessary. In this paper, we propose a design approach to deploy safe-by-design embedded systems. To attain this goal, we rely on a small core of verified software to handle faults in applications and RTOS and recover from them while ensuring that timing constraints of safety-critical tasks are always satisfied. Faults are detected by monitoring the application timing and fault-recovery is achieved via full platform restart and software reload, enabled by the short restart time of embedded systems. Schedulability analysis is used to ensure that the timing constraints of critical plant control tasks are always satisfied in spite of faults and consequent restarts. We derive schedulability results for four restart-tolerant task models. We use a simulator to evaluate and compare the performance of the considered scheduling models

Scheduling Techniques for Operating Systems for Medical and IoT Devices: A Review

Software and Hardware synthesis are the major subtasks in the implementation of hardware/software systems. Increasing trend is to build SoCs/NoC/Embedded System for Implantable Medical Devices (IMD) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which includes multiple Microprocessors and Signal Processors, allowing designing complex hardware and software systems, yet flexible with respect to the delivered performance and executed application. An important technique, which affect the macroscopic system implementation characteristics is the scheduling of hardware operations, program instructions and software processes. This paper presents a survey of the various scheduling strategies in process scheduling. Process Scheduling has to take into account the real-time constraints. Processes are characterized by their timing constraints, periodicity, precedence and data dependency, pre-emptivity, priority etc. The affect of these characteristics on scheduling decisions has been described in this paper

최신 ECU보드를 활용하여 소프트에러들을 실시간 복구하는 기법

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. 이창건.This dissertation presents the fault-tolerant real-time scheduling using dynamic mode switch support of modern ECU hardware. This dissertation first describes the optimal capacity of the Periodic Resource which contains harmonic periodic task set using the exact time supply function.We show that the optimal capacity can be represented as sum of the each individual utilization of the task in the harmonic periodic task set for both normal state(i.e. no faults) and faulty state. Then, this dissertation proposes non-critical task overlapping technique by only using the idle time intervals of the Periodic Resource in order to overlap the non-critical tasks which ensures no additional capacity increase. Finally, this dissertation proposes the basic form of the Periodic Resources in order to efficiently use the dynamic mode switch support. Next, we also proposes the bin-packing heuristic algorithm that considers both making sub-taskset as a one Periodic Resource and Periodic Resource wide bin-packing which has the pseudo-polynomial time complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the traditional partitioned fixed-priority scheduling approach and partitioned mixed-criticality scheduling approach. Also, the achievement is made up to 18% in terms of the total needed cores compared to traditional partitioned fixed-priority approach for making the given input task set schedulable.본 논문에서는 효율적인 재구성가능 시스템 사용을 위한 계층기반 실시간 결함 감내 스케줄링 기법을 제안한다. 본 연구는 주기 자원 모델을 기반으로, 최적 주기 자원 서버의 용량을 주기 자원 모델이 가지는 실시간 주기 태스크 셋의 유틸라이제이션의 합으로 제시한다. 본 논문은 해당 최적 서버 용량을 시스템이 정상 동작할때와 오동작 할때 모두에 대해서 제시한다. 다음으로, 비중요 태스크 셋들을 중요 주기 자원 서버의 여분 공백 시간을 활용해 서버 용량의 증가 없이 비중요 태스크를 중요 주기 자원 서버에 할당하는 방법론을 제시한다. 마지막으로 본 논문은 주기 자원 서버 단위의 파티션 기법과 주기 태스크를 하나의 주기 자원 서버로 만드는 빈패킹 휴리스틱 알고리즘을 제시한다. 실험 결과, 본 논문에서 제시한 알고리즘은 기존에 사용되었던 파티션 기반 우선순위 스케줄링 알고리즘과 파티션 기반 우선순위 혼잡 중요도 알고리즘보다 더 작은 수의 코어의 개수를 도출 할 수 있음을 보인다. 실험결과를 기반으로, 본 연구에서 제안한 알고리즘을 재구성가능 시스템에 활용한다면 기존 방법 대비 최대 18%의 코어절감효과를 기대할수 있다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation and Objective 1 1.2 Approach 2 1.3 Organization 6 2 System Model 7 3 Schedulability Analysis 10 3.1 Background 10 3.2 Optimal Capacity Analysis During Normal State 14 3.3 Optimal Capacity Analysis During Fault State 16 3.4 Periodic Resource Wide Schedulability Test 20 3.5 Non-Critical Task Overlapping 24 4 Proposed Approach 26 4.1 Minimum Harmonic Partitions of the Task Set 26 4.2 Proposed Heuristic Algorithm 28 4.2.1 Choosing Detection method 28 4.2.2 Packing Minimum Harmonic Partitions 29 4.2.3 Packing Free Tasks 30 4.2.4 Packing Non-Critical Tasks 31 4.3 Algorithm Description 32 5 Evaluation 35 5.1 Experimental Setup 35 5.2 Simulation Results 36 5.2.1 Free Task Bin-Packing 38 5.2.2 Minimum Harmonic Partitions Bin-Packing 40 5.2.3 Effect of Non-Critical Task Overlapping 43 5.2.4 Effect of State-Wise Computation 45 6 Related Works 46 6.1 Hierarchical Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Scheduling 46 6.2 Error Detection Method 46 7 Conclusion 48 References 50Maste

Performance Analysis of Preemptive Based Uniprocessor Scheduling

All the real-time systems are bound with response time constraints, or else, there is a risk of  severe consequences, which includes failure. The System will fail when not able to meet the requirements according to the specifications. The problem of real-time scheduling is very vast, ranging from uni-processor to complicated-multiprocessor. In this paper, we have compared the performance of real-time tasks that should be scheduled properly, to get optimum performance. Analysis methodology and the concept of optimization leads to the design of appropriate scheduling. We have done  the analysis among RM and EDF algorithm that are important for scheduling in uni-processor

Adaptive Fault Tolerance and Graceful Degradation Under Dynamic Hard Real-time Scheduling

Static redundancy allocation is inappropriate in hard realtime systems that operate in variable and dynamic environments, (e.g., radar tracking, avionics). Adaptive Fault Tolerance (AFT) can assure adequate reliability of critical modules, under temporal and resources constraints, by allocating just as much redundancy to less critical modules as can be afforded, thus gracefully reducing their resource requirement. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for supporting adaptive fault tolerance in a real-time system. Adaptation is achieved by choosing a suitable redundancy strategy for a dynamically arriving computation to assure required reliability and to maximize the potential for fault tolerance while ensuring that deadlines are met. The proposed approach is evaluated using a real-life workload simulating radar tracking software in AWACS early warning aircraft. The results demonstrate that our technique outperforms static fault tolerance strategies in terms of tasks meeting their timing constraints. Further, we show that the gain in this timing-centric performance metric does not reduce the fault tolerance of the executing tasks below a predefined minimum level. Overall, the evaluation indicates that the proposed ideas result in a system that dynamically provides QOS guarantees along the fault-tolerance dimension

Software Fault Tolerance in Real-Time Systems: Identifying the Future Research Questions

Tolerating hardware faults in modern architectures is becoming a prominent problem due to the miniaturization of the hardware components, their increasing complexity, and the necessity to reduce the costs. Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance approaches have been developed to improve the system dependability to hardware faults without resorting to custom hardware solutions. However, these come at the expense of making the satisfaction of the timing constraints of the applications/activities harder from a scheduling standpoint. This paper surveys the current state of the art of fault tolerance approaches when used in the context real-time systems, identifying the main challenges and the cross-links between these two topics. We propose a joint scheduling-failure analysis model that highlights the formal interactions among software fault tolerance mechanisms and timing properties. This model allows us to present and discuss many open research questions with the final aim to spur the future research activities

Energy-Efficient Fault-Tolerant Scheduling Algorithm for Real-Time Tasks in Cloud-Based 5G Networks

© 2013 IEEE. Green computing has become a hot issue for both academia and industry. The fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks put forward a high request for energy efficiency and low latency. The cloud radio access network provides efficient resource use, high performance, and high availability for 5G systems. However, hardware and software faults of cloud systems may lead to failure in providing real-time services. Developing fault tolerance technique can efficiently enhance the reliability and availability of real-time cloud services. The core idea of fault-tolerant scheduling algorithm is introducing redundancy to ensure that the tasks can be finished in the case of permanent or transient system failure. Nevertheless, the redundancy incurs extra overhead for cloud systems, which results in considerable energy consumption. In this paper, we focus on the problem of how to reduce the energy consumption when providing fault tolerance. We first propose a novel primary-backup-based fault-tolerant scheduling architecture for real-time tasks in the cloud environment. Based on the architecture, we present an energy-efficient fault-tolerant scheduling algorithm for real-time tasks (EFTR). EFTR adopts a proactive strategy to increase the system processing capacity and employs a rearrangement mechanism to improve the resource utilization. Simulation experiments are conducted on the CloudSim platform to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of EFTR. Compared with the existing fault-tolerant scheduling algorithms, EFTR shows excellent performance in energy conservation and task schedulability