A Unifying Response Time Analysis Framework for Dynamic Self-Suspending Tasks

For real-time embedded systems, self-suspending behaviors can cause substantial performance/schedulability degradations. In this paper, we focus on preemptive fixed-priority scheduling for the dynamic self-suspension task model on uniprocessor. This model assumes that a job of a task can dynamically suspend itself during its execution (for instance, to wait for shared resources or access co-processors or external devices). The total suspension time of a job is upper-bounded, but this dynamic behavior drastically influences the interference generated by this task on lower-priority tasks. The state-of-the-art results for this task model can be classified into three categories (i) modeling suspension as computation, (ii) modeling suspension as release jitter, and (iii) modeling suspension as a blocking term. However, several results associated to the release jitter approach have been recently proven to be erroneous, and the concept of modeling suspension as blocking was never formally proven correct. This paper presents a unifying response time analysis framework for the dynamic self-suspending task model. We provide a rigorous proof and show that the existing analyses pertaining to the three categories mentioned above are analytically dominated by our proposed solution. Therefore, all those techniques are in fact correct, but they are inferior to the proposed response time analysis in this paper. The evaluation results show that our analysis framework can generate huge improvements (an increase of up to 50% of the number of task sets deemed schedulable) over these state-of-the-art analyses.