Distributed Pipeline Scheduling: A Framework for Distributed, Heterogeneous Real-Time System Design

This paper describes the Distributed Pipeline Scheduling Framework that provides a systematic approach to designing distributed, heterogeneous realtime systems. This paper formalizes Distributed Pipelining Scheduling by providing a set of abstractions and transformations to map real-time applications to system resources, to create highly efficient and predictable systems, and to de-compose the very complex multiresource system timing analysis problem into a set of simpler application stream and single resource schedulability problems to ascertain that all real-time application timing requirements are met. Distributed Pipeline Scheduling includes support for distributed, heterogeneous system resources and diverse local scheduling policies, global scheduling policies for efficient resource utilization, flow-control mechanisms for predictable system behavior, and a range of system reconfiguration options to meet application timing requirements. An audio/video example is used in this paper to demonstrate the power and utility of Distributed Pipeline Scheduling.