Budgeting Under-Specified Tasks for Weakly-Hard Real-Time Systems

In this paper, we present an extension of slack analysis for budgeting in the design of weakly-hard real-time systems. During design, it often happens that some parts of a task set are fully specified while other parameters, e.g. regarding recovery or monitoring tasks, will be available only much later. In such cases, slack analysis can help anticipate how these missing parameters can influence the behavior of the whole system so that a resource budget can be allocated to them. It is, however, sufficient in many application contexts to budget these tasks in order to preserve weakly-hard rather than hard guarantees. We thus present an extension of slack analysis for deriving task budgets for systems with hard and weakly-hard requirements. This work is motivated by and validated on a realistic case study inspired by industrial practice

A Three Phase Scheduling for System Energy Minimization of Weakly Hard Real Time Systems

This paper aims to present a three phase scheduling algorithm that offers lesser energy consumption for weakly hard real time systems modeled with (1D55E;1D55E;1D55E;1D55E;, 1D55C;1D55C;1D55C;1D55C;) constraint. The weakly hard real time system consists of a DVS processor (frequency dependent) and peripheral devices (frequency independent) components. The energy minimization is done in three phase taking into account the preemption overhead. The first phase partitions the jobs into mandatory and optional while assigning processor speed ensuring the feasibility of the task set. The second phase proposes a greedy based preemption control technique which reduces the energy consumption due to preemption. While the third phase refines the feasible schedule received from the second phase by two methods, namely speed adjustment and delayed start. The proposed speed adjustment assigns optimal speed to each job whereas fragmented idle slots are accumulated to provide better opportunity to switch the component into sleep state by delayed start strategy as a result leads to energy saving. The simulation results and examples illustrate that our approach can effectively reduce the overall system energy consumption (especially for systems with higher utilizations) while guaranteeing the (1D55E;1D55E;1D55E;1D55E;, 1D55C;1D55C;1D55C;1D55C;) at the same time

Bounding Deadline Misses in Weakly-Hard Real-Time Systems with Task Dependencies

International audienceReal-time systems with functional dependencies between tasks often require end-to-end (as opposed to task-level) guarantees. For many of these systems, it is even possible to accept the possibility of longer end-to-end delays if one can bound their frequency. Such systems are called weakly-hard. In this paper we provide end-to-end deadline miss models for systems with task chains using Typical Worst-Case Analysis (TWCA). This bounds the number of potential deadline misses in a given sequence of activations of a task chain. To achieve this we exploit task chain properties which arise from the priority assignment of tasks in static-priority preemptive systems. This work is motivated by and validated on a realistic case study inspired by industrial practice and derived synthetic test cases

Dynamic Window-Constrained Scheduling for Real-Time Media Streaming

This paper describes an algorithm for scheduling packets in real-time multimedia data streams. Common to these classes of data streams are service constraints in terms of bandwidth and delay. However, it is typical for real-time multimedia streams to tolerate bounded delay variations and, in some cases, finite losses of packets. We have therefore developed a scheduling algorithm that assumes streams have window-constraints on groups of consecutive packet deadlines. A window-constraint defines the number of packet deadlines that can be missed in a window of deadlines for consecutive packets in a stream. Our algorithm, called Dynamic Window-Constrained Scheduling (DWCS), attempts to guarantee no more than x out of a window of y deadlines are missed for consecutive packets in real-time and multimedia streams. Using DWCS, the delay of service to real-time streams is bounded even when the scheduler is overloaded. Moreover, DWCS is capable of ensuring independent delay bounds on streams, while at the same time guaranteeing minimum bandwidth utilizations over tunable and finite windows of time. We show the conditions under which the total demand for link bandwidth by a set of real-time (i.e., window-constrained) streams can exceed 100% and still ensure all window-constraints are met. In fact, we show how it is possible to guarantee worst-case per-stream bandwidth and delay constraints while utilizing all available link capacity. Finally, we show how best-effort packets can be serviced with fast response time, in the presence of window-constrained traffic

Consensual Resilient Control: Stateless Recovery of Stateful Controllers

Safety-critical systems have to absorb accidental and malicious faults to obtain high mean-times-to-failures (MTTFs). Traditionally, this is achieved through re-execution or replication. However, both techniques come with significant overheads, in particular when cold-start effects are considered. Such effects occur after replicas resume from checkpoints or from their initial state. This work aims at improving on the performance of control-task replication by leveraging an inherent stability of many plants to tolerate occasional control-task deadline misses and suggests masking faults just with a detection quorum. To make this possible, we have to eliminate cold-start effects to allow replicas to rejuvenate during each control cycle. We do so, by systematically turning stateful controllers into instants that can be recovered in a stateless manner. We highlight the mechanisms behind this transformation, how it achieves consensual resilient control, and demonstrate on the example of an inverted pendulum how accidental and maliciously-induced faults can be absorbed, even if control tasks run in less predictable environments

Verifying Weakly-Hard Real-Time Properties of Traffic Streams in Switched Networks

In this paper, we introduce the first verification method which is able to provide weakly-hard real-time guarantees for tasks and task chains in systems with multiple resources under partitioned scheduling with fixed priorities. Existing weakly-hard real-time verification techniques are restricted today to systems with a single resource. A weakly-hard real-time guarantee specifies an upper bound on the maximum number m of deadline misses of a task in a sequence of k consecutive executions. Such a guarantee is useful if a task can experience a bounded number of deadline misses without impacting the system mission. We present our verification method in the context of switched networks with traffic streams between nodes, and demonstrate its practical applicability in an automotive case study