HW Resource Componentizing for Addressing the Mega-complexity of Cyber-physical Systems

Emerging cyber-physical systems (CPSs) demand a new computing abstraction since the traditional ones have fundamental limitations in handling the para-functional also called physical requirements of CPSs such as timeliness, reliability, and evolvability. With the traditional computing abstractions such as processes, virtual memory, etc., multiple software (SW) components share hardware (HW) resources such as CPU and memory in a competitive manner causing unpredictable interferences in the para-functional properties. This problem becomes more serious along with the ever increasing scale and complexity of newly emerging cyber-physical systems. To fundamentally solve this problem, this paper proposes a HW resource componentizing approach that chops the capacity of a HW resource into smaller ones called HW components and dedicates a HW component to each SW component. With the dedicated HW component, each SW component can be guaranteed with the isolated para-functional properties regardless of surrounding SW components. This makes the system-wide issue of validating timeliness, reliability, and evolvability into the per-component validation issue. With this vision, this paper briefly presents a spatial/temporal-division scheduling algorithm that can be generally used for componentizing various HW resources including CPU, network, and RAM.