Resource conscious design of distributed real-time systems: An end-to-end approach

We present a resource conscious approach to designing distributed real-time systems. This work extends our original solution (Gerber et al., 1995), which was limited to single processor systems. Starting from a given task graph, and a set of end-to-end constraints, we systematically generate task attributes (e.g., periods and deadlines) such that: the task set is schedulable; and the end-to-end constraints are satisfied. The methodology can be mostly automated, and provides useful feedback to a designer when it fails to find a solution. We expect that the techniques presented in this paper will help reduce the laborious process of designing a real-time system, by bringing resource contention and schedulability aspects early into the design process.