Resource reservation in dynamic real-time systems

This paper focuses on the problem of providing efficient run-time support to multimedia applications in a real-time system, where different types of tasks (characterized by different criticality) can coexist. Whereas critical real-time tasks (hard tasks) are guaranteed based on worst-case execution times and minimum interarrival times, multimedia tasks are served based on mean parameters. A novel bandwidth reservation mechanism (the constant bandwidth server) allows real-time tasks to execute in a dynamic environment under a temporal protection mechanism, so that each task will never exceed a predefined bandwidth, independently of its actual requests. The paper also discusses how the proposed server can be used for handling aperiodic tasks efficiently and how a statistical analysis can be applied to perform a probabilistic guarantee of soft tasks. The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of similar service mechanisms (dynamic real-time servers and proportional share schedulers) through extensive simulation experiments.