Design of a Reliable Real-Time Scheduling Policy for Dual-Channel Networks

This paper designs and analyzes the performance of a communication scheduler that cooperates with each other over the dual-channel wireless network, aiming at enhancing reliability and timeliness of time-sensitive applications on embedded devices. The proposed scheme consists of (1) evenly partitioning the stream set into two identical ones, (2) applying EDF (Earliest Deadline First) policy on the respective set after an acceptance test, and (3) maximizing the number of switchable pairs. Based on this schedule and channel estimation, the coordinator schedules each node according to 3-level selection steps made up of normal schedule, channel switch, and slot reallocation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the deadline meet ratio by up to 28 %, compared with the global EDF policy, when packet error rate reaches 0.4. The slot reallocation can enhance the real-time performance by 11% when the deadline of each application gets larger up to 5 times of execution time.