The design of a self-maintained memory module for real-time systems

Garbage collection provides a platform that improves system adaptability, productivity and robustness. Manual management of heap storage is notoriously error prone, inflexible and most systems still contains memory leaks. Most new programming languages incorporate garbage collection such as Java and C#. Non-deterministic time and memory fragmentation of garbage collection have thwarted its application to real-time systems. One of the garbage collection techniques, called copying collector, has helped to improve the garbage collection efficiency in fast-allocating memory objects and reducing fragmentation by compacting the heap. However, the compaction time is still nondeterministic and typically the time is long. This paper proposed a self-maintained memory module that the heap compaction can be done in constant time (O(1)).