AQuoSA - adaptive quality of service architecture

This paper presents an architecture for quality of service (QoS) control of time-sensitive applications in multi-programmed embedded systems. In such systems, tasks must receive appropriate timeliness guarantees from the operating system independently from one another; otherwise, the QoS experienced by the users may decrease. Moreover, fluctuations in time of the workloads make a static partitioning of the central processing unit (CPU) that is neither appropriate nor convenient, whereas an adaptive allocation based on an on-line monitoring of the application behaviour leads to an optimum design. By combining a resource reservation scheduler and a feedback-based mechanism, we allow applications to meet their QoS requirements with the minimum possible impact on CPU occupation. We implemented the framework in AQuoSA (Adaptive Quality of Service Architecture (AQuoSA). http://aquosa.sourceforge.net), a software architecture that runs on top of the Linux kernel. We provide extensive experimental validation of our results and offer an evaluation of the introduced overhead, which is perfectly sustainable in the class of addressed applications

Modular software architecture for flexible reservation mechanisms on heterogeneous resources

Management, allocation and scheduling of heterogeneous resources for complex distributed real-time applications is a chal- lenging problem. Timing constraints of applications may be fulfilled by a proper use of real-time scheduling policies, admission control and enforcement of timing constraints. However, it is not easy to design basic infrastructure services that allow for an easy access to the allocation of multiple heterogeneous resources in a distributed environment. In this paper, we present a middleware for providing distributed soft real-time applications with a uniform API for reserving heterogeneous resources with real-time scheduling capabilities in a distributed environment. The architecture relies on standard POSIX OS facilities, such as time management and standard TCP/IP networking services, and it is designed around CORBA, in order to facilitate modularity, flexibility and portability of the applications using it. However, real-time scheduling is supported by proper extensions at the kernel-level, plugged within the framework by means of dedicated resource managers. Our current implementation on Linux supports reservation of CPU, disk and network bandwidth. However, additional resource managers supporting alternative real-time schedulers for these resources, as well as additional types of resources, may be easily added. We present experimental results gathered on both synthetic applications and a real multimedia video streaming case study, showing advantages deriving from the use of the proposed middleware. Finally, overhead figures are reported, showing sustainability of the approach for a wide class of complex, distributed, soft real-time applications

A QoS registry for adaptive real-time service-oriented applications

Real-time service-oriented applications are charac- terized by Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that cannot be properly managed by using classical real-time systems methodologies. In dynamic environments the QoS management can effectively leverage adaptive techniques, that provide flexibility and do not require a complex offline analysis. In turn, such techniques make a massive use of on-line collected data regarding the application performance and the resource requirements. Moreover, a common issue for adaptive systems is the one of deciding the initial configuration of the application and/or the run-time environment at the time of service instantiation. In this paper, we propose a QoS registry for coping with these issues and supporting the configuration of proper scheduling parameters in real-time Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The registry permits to gather QoS data related to different functional behaviors of applications, to predict the future trend based on data already collected and to permanently store such data for an effective reuse at the time of future re-instantiations. We have also built an implementation of such registry, computed its overhead costs and performed some experiments for showing the effectiveness in auto-tuning resource allocations for providing QoS guarantees in a real-time SOA

A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation

Industrial automation platforms are experiencing a paradigm shift. New technologies are making their way in the area, including embedded real-time systems, standard local area networks like Ethernet, Wi-Fi and ZigBee, IP-based communication protocols, standard service oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services. An automation system will be composed of flexible autonomous components with plug & play functionality, self configuration and diagnostics, and autonomic local control that communicate through standard networking technologies. However, the introduction of these new technologies raises important problems that need to be properly solved, one of these being the need to support real-time and quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time applications. This paper describes a SOA enhanced with real-time capabilities for industrial automation. The proposed architecture allows for negotiation of the QoS requested by clients from Web services, and provides temporal encapsulation of individual activities. This way, it is possible to perform an a priori analysis of the temporal behavior of each service, and to avoid unwanted interference among them. After describing the architecture, experimental results gathered on a real implementation of the framework (which leverages a soft real-time scheduler for the Linux kernel) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The experiments were performed on simple case studies designed in the context of industrial automation applications

Design and development of a mechanism for low-latency real time audio processing on Linux

This work is focused on developing a mechanism to support audio processing on Linux operating system using soft real-time techniques, primarily resource based scheduling with feedback (adaptive reservations)

Adaptive Real-Time Scheduling for Legacy Multimedia Applications

Multimedia applications are often executed on standard Personal Computers. The absence of established standards has hindered the adoption of real-time scheduling solutions in this class of applications. Developers have adopted a wide range of heuristic approaches to achieve an acceptable timing behaviour but the result is often unreliable. We propose a mechanism to extend the benefits of real-time scheduling to legacy applications based on the combination of two techniques: 1) a real-time monitor that observes and infers the activation period of the application, and 2) a feedback mechanism that adapts the scheduling parameters to improve its real-time performance

On the integration of application level and resource level QoS control for real-time applications

We consider a dynamic set of soft real-time applications using a set of shared resources. Each application can execute in different modes, each one associated with a level of Quality of Service (QoS). Resources, in their turn, have different modes, each one with a speed and a power consumption, and are managed by a Reservation Based scheduler enabling a dynamic allocation of the fraction of resources (bandwidth) assigned to each application. To cope with dynamic changes of the application, we advocate an adaptive resource allocation policy organised in two nested feedback loops. The internal loop operates on the scheduling parameter to obtain a resource allocation that meets the temporal constraints of the applications. The external loop operates on the QoS level of the applications and on the power level of the resources to strike a good trade-off between the global QoS and the energy consumption. This loop comes into play whenever the workload of the application exceeds the bounds that permit the internal loop to operate correctly, or whenever it decreases below a level that permit more aggressive choices for the QoS or substantial energy saving

A dual-band priority assignment algorithm for dynamic QoS resource management

Future high-quality consumer electronics will contain a number of applications running in a highly dynamic environment, and their execution will need to be efficiently arbitrated by the underlying platform software. The multimedia applications that currently execute in such similar contexts face frequent run-time variations in their resource demands, originated by the greedy nature of the multimedia processing itself. Changes in resource demands are triggered by numerous reasons (e.g. a switch in the input media compression format). Such situations require real-time adaptation mechanisms to adjust the system operation to the new requirements, and this must be done seamlessly to satisfy the user experience. One solution for efficiently managing application execution is to apply quality of service resource management techniques, based on assigning and enforcing resource contracts to applications. Most resource management solutions provide temporal isolation by enforcing resource assignments and avoiding any resource overruns. However, this has a clear limitation over the cost-effective resource usage. This paper presents a simple priority assignment scheme based on uniform priority bands to allow that greedy multimedia tasks incur in safe overruns that increase resource usage and do not threaten the timely execution of non-overrunning tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed priority assignment scheme in combination with a resource accounting mechanism preserves timely multimedia execution and delivery, achieves a higher cost-effective processor usage, and guarantees the execution isolation of non-overrunning tasks