Smart dynamic memory allocator for embedded systems

Abstract

Dynamic memory (DM) allocation is one of the most crucial components of modern software engineering. It offers a greatest flexibility to the software systemspsila design; nevertheless, developers of real-time systems often avoid using dynamic memory allocation due to its problems like unbounded or long bounded response time and memory fragmentation. However, the modern complex applications like multimedia streaming and network applications made the dynamic memory allocation mandatory for applicationspsila design. The major challenges of memory allocator are minimizing fragmentation, providing a good response time, and maintaining a good locality among the memory blocks. This paper introduces a new smart dynamic memory allocator particularly for embedded systems that have limited memory and processing power. It aimed at addressing the major challenges of dynamic memory allocator. The smart allocator predicts the short-lived objects and allocates those objects on one side of the heap memory and remaining objects on other side of the heap memory for effective utilization of memory footprint. The allocator is implemented with enhanced multilevel segregated mechanism using lookup tables and hierarchical bitmaps that ensure very good response time and reliable timing performance. The proposed algorithm has shown excellent experimental results, with respect to both response time and memory footprint usage, as compared to the well known algorithms. In addition, this paper presents a memory intensive synthetic (MIS) work load, which can model the allocation behavior of most of the real applications.