Execution-Efficient Response Time Analysis on Global Multiprocessor Platforms

Abstract

Response time analysis (RTA) is an important and fundamental tool for analyzing the schedulability of real-time tasks on multiprocessor platforms, and many promising techniques have been developed during the past few years. However, most of the existing researches focus on improving the analysis precision, while less has been done on enhancing the execution efficiency. In this paper, we take, to our best knowledge, the first effort towards improving the efficiency of the state-of-the-art RTA methods for sporadic tasks under both global fixed-priority (G-FP) and global earliest deadline first (G-EDF) scheduling. Specifically, three factors that impact the efficiency of existing global RTA tests are identified: 1) pessimistic initial value when computing the worst-case response time (WCRT) of tasks under both G-FP and G-EDF; 2) conservative interference upper bound under both G-FP and G-EDF; and 3) unnecessary recalculation of WCRTs when there is update of any task WCRT under G-EDF. By addressing these three limitations, we propose two efficient RTA methods for G-FP and G-EDF scheduling, respectively, which achieve better run-time performance but without sacrificing any analysis precision. Experimental evaluations with randomly generated task sets show that the proposed methods exhibit remarkable performance improvements and can save on average 60 and 61 percent run time, as compared to the state-of-the-art technologies under G-FP and G-EDF scheduling, respectively.