Comparing Availability-Aware Real-Time Schedulers by Means of Configurable Experimental Framework

In this paper, an overview of scheduling mechanisms constructed to enhance availability of services an embedded real-time system delivers is introduced along with the concept of a framework for comparison of the mechanisms. The framework expects that XML-based descriptions of the following parts of the system are available at its input: target device, operating system, application, scheduler and specification of experiments. On basis of the inputs, the framework is able to produce source-codes for a given platform and an operating system and after their compilation and programming by third-party tools, to perform and evaluate the experiments according to their specification. The applicability of the framework has been shown on selected component-of-the-shelf components such as a microcontroller, an operating system and on several sets of artificial as well as real-world applications running under limiting conditions such as insufficient amount of power and/or computational (re)sources. At the end of the paper, several mechanisms are evaluated on basis of the framework in order to show its practical applicability and kind of results achievable at its output.