Fault Tolerant Scheduling of Mixed Criticality Real-time Tasks under Error Bursts

Abstract

Dependability is an important requirement in hard real-time applications due to the potentially catastrophic consequences of failures. In these systems, fault tolerance mechanisms like temporal redundancy are adopted to improve reliability. Most of these types of systems are increasingly moving towards integrating critical and non-critical functionalities on the same platform to, e.g., better utilize resources and further reduce cost, and are commonly deployed in environments where errors typically occur in the form of bursts e.g., due to Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI). Consequently, in mixed criticality real-time systems, the designer must guarantee that critical tasks are feasible even under the presence of the error burst, while ensuring the feasibility of the non-critical tasks that are not affected by the burst. We refer to this as Fault Tolerance feasibility (FT-feasibility) of mixed-criticality real-time systems.In this paper, we build on the well established results on Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling, to derive a sufficient test that determines the FT-feasibility of a set of mixed criticality real-time tasks under the assumption that the inter-arrival time between two consecutive error bursts is at least equal to the hyper-period of the taskset.