Resource-efficient real-time scheduling using credit-controlled static-priority arbitration.

A present-day System-on-Chip (SoC) runs a wide range of applications with diverse real-time requirements. Resources, such as processors, interconnects and memories, are shared between these applications to reduce cost. Resource sharing causes temporal interference, which must be bounded by a suitable resource arbiter. System-level analysis techniques use the service guarantee of the arbiter to ensure that real-time requirements of these applications are satisfied. A service guarantee that underestimates the minimum service provided by an arbiter results in more allocation of resources than needed to satisfy latency and throughput requirements. For instance, a linear service guarantee cannot accurately capture burst service provision by many priority-based schedulers, such as Credit-Controlled Static Priority (CCSP) and Priority-Budget Scheduling (PBS). As a result, the timing analysis of these arbiters becomes too pessimistic. This leads to unnecessary cost penalties since some SoC resources, such as SDRAM bandwidth, are scarce and expensive. This paper addresses this problem for the CCSP arbiter. The two main contributions are: (1) a piecewise linear service guarantee that accurately captures bursty service provisioning, and (2) an equivalent dataflow model of the new service guarantee, which is an essential component to integrate the arbiter with dataflow-based system-level design techniques that analyze the worst-case latency and throughput of real-time applications. The new service guarantee enables efficient resource utilization under CCSP arbitration. Experimental results of an H.263 video decoder application show that memory bandwidth savings from 26% up to 67% can be achieved by using the new service guarantee as compared to the existing linear service guarantee.