Dynamic hinting: Collaborative real-time resource management for reactive embedded systems

The increasing complexity of today’s reactive embedded applications can rapidly result in reduced real-time capabilities of the underlying hard and software. As an example for this paper we’ll refer to the specific and growing demands on the severely resource constrained sensor nodes in sensor/actuator networks (SANet). While preemptive operating systems are one way to retain acceptable reactivity within highly dynamic environments, their concurrency paradigm commonly leads to severe resource management problems, caused by the coexistence of tasks with interfering and even varying requirements. To counteract these problems, we present the novel Dynamic Hinting approach for maintaining good reactivity in typically resource constrained sensor/actuator systems by efficient combination of preemptive task scheduling and collaborative resource allocation. With respect to task priorities, our technique significantly improves classical methods for handling priority inversions (and deadlocks where required) under both short- and long-term resource allocations. Furthermore, we facilitate compositional software design by providing independently developed tasks with runtime information for yet collaborative and reflective resource sharing – e.g. by means of time-utility-functions. In many cases this even allows to reduce blocking delays as otherwise imposed by bounded priority inversion.