FIT: A Flexible, Lightweight, and Real-Time Scheduling System for Wireless Sensor Platforms

Abstract

We propose FIT, a flexible, lightweight, and real-time scheduling system for wireless sensor platforms. There are three salient features of FIT. First, its two-tier hierarchical framework supports customizable application-specific scheduling policies, hence, FIT is very flexible. Second, FIT is lightweight in terms of minimizing the thread number to reduce preemptions and memory consumption while at the same time ensuring system schedulability. We propose a novel Minimum Thread Scheduling Policy (MTSP) exploration algorithm within FIT to achieve this goal. Finally, FIT provides a detailed real-time schedulability analysis method to help check if application's temporal requirements can be met. We implemented FIT on MicaZ motes and carried out extensive evaluations. Results demonstrate that FIT is indeed flexible and lightweight for implementing real-time applications, at the same time, the schedulability analysis provided can predict the real-time behavior. FIT is a promising scheduling system for implementing complex real-time applications in sensor networks.