Distributed pipeline scheduling: A framework for distributed, heterogeneous real-time system design

Abstract

This paper describes the distributed pipeline scheduling framework that provides a systematic approach to designing distributed, heterogeneous real-time systems. This paper formalizes distributed pipelining scheduling by providing a set of abstractions and transformations to map real-time applications to system resources, to create highly efficient and predictable systems, and to decompose the very complex multi-resource system timing analysis problem into a set of simpler application stream and single-resource schedulability problems to ascertain that all real-time application timing requirements are met. Distributed pipeline scheduling includes support for distributed, heterogeneous system resources and diverse local scheduling policies, global scheduling policies for efficient resource utilization, flow-control mechanisms for predictable system behaviour, and a range of system reconfiguration options to meet application timing requirements. An audio/video example is used in this paper to demonstrate the power and utility of distributed pipeline scheduling. © 1995 The British Computer Society.