Distributed pipeline scheduling: end-to-end analysis of heterogeneous, multi-resource real-time systems

This paper presents an hierarchical end-to-end analysis technique that decomposes the very complex heterogeneous multi-resource scheduling problem into a set of single resource scheduling problems with well defined interactions. We define heterogeneity both in resource types, e.g., CPU, and in scheduling policies, e.g., rate-monotonic scheduling. This analysis technique is one phase of our systems integration framework for designing large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed real-time systems whose timing properties can be strictly controlled and analyzed. This approach, denoted the Distributed Pipelining Framework, exploits the natural pipelining execution pattern found in a large number of continuous (periodic) applications executing over heterogenous resources. A teleconference application is used in this paper to show the utility of the approach