Improved load balancing and scheduling performance in embedded systems with task migration

This paper presents a migration mechanism for tasks running in nodes of a wireless sensor network (WSN). The WSN is consisted of digital signal processing nodes implemented with Blackfin microcomputers with Micrium μC OS III operating system. The migration mechanism allows load balancing, better scheduling of the tasks and allow cooperative signal processing at the whole network and it is useful in case of the node failures as well. This mechanism uses the Micrium operating system primitives in order to decide when the task migration will be started and to control the whole migration process. The communication network is provided by Lightweight Internet Protocol (LwIP) protocol. A performance evaluation (load balance, migration time and missed deadlines ratio) is performed. The paper demonstrates viable implementation of tasks migration in embedded systems and illustrates a better performance of the load balancing and the tasks scheduling.