Using hierarchical scheduling to support soft real-time applications in general-purpose operating systems

Journal ArticleThe CPU schedulers in general-purpose operating systems are designed to provide fast response time for interactive applications and high throughput for batch applications. The heuristics used to achieve these goals do not lend themselves to scheduling real-time applications, nor do they meet other scheduling requirements such as coordinating scheduling across several processors or machines, or enforcing isolation between applications, users, and administrative domains. Extending the scheduling subsystems of general-purpose operating systems in an ad hoc manner is time consuming and requires considerable expertise as well as source code to the operating system. Furthermore, once extended, the new scheduler may be as inflexible as the original. The thesis of this dissertation is that extending a general-purpose operating system with a general, heterogeneous scheduling hierarchy is feasible and useful. A hierarchy of schedulers generalizes the role of CPU schedulers by allowing them to schedule other schedulers in addition to scheduling threads. A general, heterogeneous scheduling hierarchy is one that allows arbitrary (or nearly arbitrary) scheduling algorithms throughout the hierarchy. In contrast, most of the previous work on hierarchical scheduling has imposed restrictions on the schedulers used in part or all of the hierarchy. This dissertation describes the Hierarchical Loadable Scheduler (HLS) architecture, which permits schedulers to be dynamically composed in the kernel of a general-purpose operating system. The most important characteristics of HLS, and the ones that distinguish it from previous work, are that it has demonstrated that a hierarchy of nearly arbitrary schedulers can be efficiently implemented in a general-purpose operating system, and that the behavior of a hierarchy of soft real-time schedulers can be reasoned about in order to provide guaranteed scheduling behavior to application threads. The flexibility afforded by HLS permits scheduling behavior to be tailored to meet complex requirements without encumbering users who have modest requirements with the performance and administrative costs of a complex scheduler. Contributions of this dissertation include the following. (1) The design, prototype implementation, and performance evaluation of HLS in Windows 2000. (2) A system of guarantees for scheduler composition that permits reasoning about the scheduling behavior of a hierarchy of soft real-time schedulers. Guarantees assure users that application requirements can be met throughout the lifetime of the application, and also provide application developers with a model of CPU allocation to which they can program. (3) The design, implementation, and evaluation of two augmented CPU reservation schedulers, which provide increase scheduling predictability when low-level operating system activity steals time from applications

A robust mechanism for adaptive scheduling of multimedia applications

We propose an adaptive scheduling technique to schedule highly dynamic multimedia tasks on a CPU. We use a combination of two techniques: the first one is a feedback mechanism to track the resource requirements of the tasks based on local observations. The second one is a mechanism that operates with a global visibility, reclaiming unused bandwidth. The combination proves very effective: resource reclaiming increases the robustness of the feedback, while the identification of the correct bandwidth made by the feedback increases the effectiveness of the reclamation. We offer both theoretical results and an extensive experimental validation of the approach

Unified clustering and communication protocol for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we present an energy-efficient cross layer protocol for providing application specific reservations in wireless senor networks called the “Unified Clustering and Communication Protocol ” (UCCP). Our modular cross layered framework satisfies three wireless sensor network requirements, namely, the QoS requirement of heterogeneous applications, energy aware clustering and data forwarding by relay sensor nodes. Our unified design approach is motivated by providing an integrated and viable solution for self organization and end-to-end communication is wireless sensor networks. Dynamic QoS based reservation guarantees are provided using a reservation-based TDMA approach. Our novel energy-efficient clustering approach employs a multi-objective optimization technique based on OR (operations research) practices. We adopt a simple hierarchy in which relay nodes forward data messages from cluster head to the sink, thus eliminating the overheads needed to maintain a routing protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that UCCP provides an energy-efficient and scalable solution to meet the application specific QoS demands in resource constrained sensor nodes. Index Terms — wireless sensor networks, unified communication, optimization, clustering and quality of service

Resource management in IP-based radio access networks

IP is being considered to be used in the Radio Access Network (RAN) of UMTS. It is of paramount importance to be able to provide good QoS guarantees to real time services in such an IP-based RAN. QoS in IP networks is most efficiently provided with Differentiated services (Diffserv). However, currently Diffserv mainly specifies Per Hop Behaviors (PHB). Proper mechanisms for admission control and resource reservation have not yet been defined. A new resource management concept in the IP-based RAN is needed to offer QoS guarantees to real time services. We investigate the current Diffserv mechanisms and contribute to development of a new resource management protocol. We focus on the load control algorithm [9], which is an attempt to solve the problem of admission control and resource reservation in IP-based networks. In this document we present some load control issues and propose to enhance the load control protocol with the Measurement Based Admission Control (MBAC) concept. With this enhancement the traffic load in the IP-based RAN can be estimated, since the ingress router in the network path can be notified by marking packets with the resource state information. With this knowledge, the ingress router can perform admission control to keep the IP-based RAN stable with a high utilization even in overload situations

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

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

A Framework for Enhanced QoS Support in IEEE 802.11e Networks

IEEE 802.11 based WLANs have became popular, but they can only provide best effort services and so they are poorly suitable for multimedia applications. Recently IEEE 802.11e standard has been proposed to support quality of service. The new standard introduces a so-called Hybrid Coordination Function containing two medium access mechanisms: contention-based channel access and controlled channel access. In this paper we propose a novel framework to better support QoS guarantees for multimedia applications. It comprises QoS Manager, Admission Control, Enhanced Scheduler, Predictor and Feedback System. The scheduler adopted supports real-time applications, variable packet sizes and variable bit rate traffic streams. We show that this framework is suitable to be used by applications requesting Application Level Contracts which will be translated in Resource Level Contracts to the scheduler subsystem. The QoS manager component is able to dynamically manage available resources under different load conditions