69,813 research outputs found
Synthesis of Safe, QoS Extendible, Application Specific Schedulers for Heterogeneous Real-Time Systems
We present a new scheduler architecture, which permits adding QoS (quality of service) policies to the scheduling decisions. We also present a new scheduling synthesis method which allows a designer to obtain a safe scheduler for a particular application. Our scheduler architecture and scheduler synthesis method can be used for heterogeneous applications where the tasks communicate through various synchronization primitives. We present a prototype implementation of this scheduler architecture and related mechanisms on top of an open-source OS (operating system) for embedded systems
Real-time disk scheduling in a mixed-media file system
This paper presents our real-time disk scheduler called the Delta L scheduler, which optimizes unscheduled best-effort disk requests by giving priority to best-effort disk requests while meeting real-time request deadlines. Our scheduler tries to execute real-time disk requests as much as possible in the background. Only when real-time request deadlines are endangered, our scheduler gives priority to real-time disk requests. The Delta L disk scheduler is part of our mixed-media file system called Clockwise. An essential part of our work is extensive and detailed raw disk performance measurements. The Delta L disk scheduler for its real-time schedulability analysis and to decide whether scheduling a best-effort request before a real-time request violates real-time constraints uses these raw performance measurements. Further, a Clockwise off-line simulator uses the raw performance measurements where a number of different disk schedulers are compared. We compare the Delta L scheduler with a prioritizing Latest Start Time (LST) scheduler and non-prioritizing EDF scheduler. The Delta L scheduler is comparable to LST in achieving low latencies for best-effort requests under light to moderate real-time loads and better in achieving low latencies for best-effort requests for extreme real-time loads. The simulator is calibrated to an actual Clockwise. Clockwise runs on a 200MHz Pentium-Pro based PC with PCI bus, multiple SCSI controllers and disks on Linux 2.2.x and the Nemesis kernel. Clockwise performance is dictated by the hardware: all available bandwidth can be committed to real-time streams, provided hardware overloads do not occur
Reinforcement Learning Scheduler for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Outside Coverage
Radio resources in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can be scheduled
either by a centralized scheduler residing in the network (e.g., a base station
in case of cellular systems) or a distributed scheduler, where the resources
are autonomously selected by the vehicles. The former approach yields a
considerably higher resource utilization in case the network coverage is
uninterrupted. However, in case of intermittent or out-of-coverage, due to not
having input from centralized scheduler, vehicles need to revert to distributed
scheduling. Motivated by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), we
investigate whether a centralized learning scheduler can be taught to
efficiently pre-assign the resources to vehicles for out-of-coverage V2V
communication. Specifically, we use the actor-critic RL algorithm to train the
centralized scheduler to provide non-interfering resources to vehicles before
they enter the out-of-coverage area. Our initial results show that a RL-based
scheduler can achieve performance as good as or better than the state-of-art
distributed scheduler, often outperforming it. Furthermore, the learning
process completes within a reasonable time (ranging from a few hundred to a few
thousand epochs), thus making the RL-based scheduler a promising solution for
V2V communications with intermittent network coverage.Comment: Article published in IEEE VNC 201
Real-Time Communication in Wireless Home Networks
This paper describes a medium access protocol for real-time communication in wireless networks. Medium access is controlled by a scheduler, which utilizes a pre-emptive earliest deadline first (PEDF) scheduling algorithm. The scheduler prevents collisions in the network, where normally only collisions are avoided. PEDF is the scheduler of choice, because it has excellent properties with respect to bandwidth utilization, dynamic behaviour and feasibily analysis. The scheduler can be deployed in managed networks, where it resides in the base station, as well as in peer to peer or ad hoc networks, were it is distributed over the stations. The protocol is simulated and an implementation based on IEEE 802.11b is realized
Store-Forward and its implications for Proportional Scheduling
The Proportional Scheduler was recently proposed as a scheduling algorithm
for multi-hop switch networks. For these networks, the BackPressure scheduler
is the classical benchmark. For networks with fixed routing, the Proportional
Scheduler is maximum stable, myopic and, furthermore, will alleviate certain
scaling issued found in BackPressure for large networks. Nonetheless, the
equilibrium and delay properties of the Proportional Scheduler has not been
fully characterized.
In this article, we postulate on the equilibrium behaviour of the
Proportional Scheduler though the analysis of an analogous rule called the
Store-Forward allocation. It has been shown that Store-Forward has
asymptotically allocates according to the Proportional Scheduler. Further, for
Store-Forward networks, numerous equilibrium quantities are explicitly
calculable. For FIFO networks under Store-Forward, we calculate the policies
stationary distribution and end-to-end route delay. We discuss network
topologies when the stationary distribution is product-form, a phenomenon which
we call \emph{product form resource pooling}. We extend this product form
notion to independent set scheduling on perfect graphs, where we show that
non-neighbouring queues are statistically independent. Finally, we analyse the
large deviations behaviour of the equilibrium distribution of Store-Forward
networks in order to construct Lyapunov functions for FIFO switch networks
A Backward Algorithm for the Multiprocessor Online Feasibility of Sporadic Tasks
The online feasibility problem (for a set of sporadic tasks) asks whether
there is a scheduler that always prevents deadline misses (if any), whatever
the sequence of job releases, which is a priori} unknown to the scheduler. In
the multiprocessor setting, this problem is notoriously difficult. The only
exact test for this problem has been proposed by Bonifaci and
Marchetti-Spaccamela: it consists in modelling all the possible behaviours of
the scheduler and of the tasks as a graph; and to interpret this graph as a
game between the tasks and the scheduler, which are seen as antagonistic
players. Then, computing a correct scheduler is equivalent to finding a winning
strategy for the `scheduler player', whose objective in the game is to avoid
deadline misses. In practice, however this approach is limited by the
intractable size of the graph. In this work, we consider the classical
attractor algorithm to solve such games, and introduce antichain techniques to
optimise its performance in practice and overcome the huge size of the game
graph. These techniques are inspired from results from the formal methods
community, and exploit the specific structure of the feasibility problem. We
demonstrate empirically that our approach allows to dramatically improve the
performance of the game solving algorithm.Comment: Long version of a conference paper accepted to ACSD 201
Design of State-based Schedulers for a Network of Control Loops
For a closed-loop system, which has a contention-based multiple access
network on its sensor link, the Medium Access Controller (MAC) may discard some
packets when the traffic on the link is high. We use a local state-based
scheduler to select a few critical data packets to send to the MAC. In this
paper, we analyze the impact of such a scheduler on the closed-loop system in
the presence of traffic, and show that there is a dual effect with state-based
scheduling. In general, this makes the optimal scheduler and controller hard to
find. However, by removing past controls from the scheduling criterion, we find
that certainty equivalence holds. This condition is related to the classical
result of Bar-Shalom and Tse, and it leads to the design of a scheduler with a
certainty equivalent controller. This design, however, does not result in an
equivalent system to the original problem, in the sense of Witsenhausen.
Computing the estimate is difficult, but can be simplified by introducing a
symmetry constraint on the scheduler. Based on these findings, we propose a
dual predictor architecture for the closed-loop system, which ensures
separation between scheduler, observer and controller. We present an example of
this architecture, which illustrates a network-aware event-triggering
mechanism.Comment: 17 pages, technical repor
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