Tolerating faults while maximizing reward

The imprecise computation (IC) model is a general scheduling framework, capable of expressing the precision vs. timeliness trade-off involved in many current real-time applications. In that model, each task comprises mandatory and optional parts. While allowing greater scheduling flexibility, mandatory parts in the IC model have still hard deadlines and hence they must be completed before the task’s deadline even in the presence of faults. In this paper, we address fault tolerant (FT) scheduling issues for IC tasks. First, we propose two recovery schemes, namely Immediate Recovery and Delayed Recovery. These schemes can be readily applied to provide fault tolerance to mandatory parts by scheduling optional parts appropriately for recovery operations. After deriving the necessary and sufficient conditions for both schemes, we consider the FT-Optimality problem, that is, generating a schedule which is FT and whose reward is maximum among all possible FT schedules. For Immediate Recovery, we present and prove correctness of an efficient FT-Optimal scheduling algorithm. For Delayed Recovery, we show that the FT-Optimality problem is NP-Hard, thus is intractable.