Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Scheduling

FT Scheduling in Distributed and Multiprocessor systems

Use primary/backup (PB) scheduling for achieving fault tolerance. Use the concept of overloading a backup (ie, more than one backup use the same time slot) and de-allocation of unused backup slots. This is for non-preemptive timeline scheduling.

Papers describing:

Simulation results show that our method achieves higher task schedulability than using a spare processor as a backup to be invoked in the event of a failure. Further, we show that the cost, in terms of schedulability, of guaranteeing fault tolerance for dynamic systems in a fault-free environment is extremely low.

FT Scheduling in Single Processor NON-Preemptive systems

Devised an optimal scheme to guarantee FT RT PB scheduling assuming any queue-based scheduling technique in RTSS '95. The optimal solution is based on dynamic programming and the second is a greedy heuristic which closely approximates the optimal.

FT Scheduling in Single Processor Preemptive systems

We have also described a recovery scheme for re-execution in the event of faults and its accompanying FT-RMS bounds (similar to Liu and Leyland's bounds, with a multiplying factor!). We also extend the original RMS, EDF, and the exact characterization of RMS to provide tolerance for single and multiple transient faults. Finally, we analyze and compare those bounds with existing bounds for non-fault-tolerant and other variations of RMS. The FT-RMS results appear in the Journal of Real-Time Systems.

Sunondo Ghosh's dissertation, which combines all these aspects, is here .

FT need not be at the level of particular tasks. To exploit system-level fault-tolerant behavior of a real-time system, we have developed a scenario changing scheme to create feasible schedules either online or offline. We allow the system to switch between schedules to implement graceful degradation, fault masking, load shedding, and other FT techniques for RTSs.


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last generated on Thu Sep 2 1997 by Daniel Mosse'