The impact of resource heterogeneity on the timeliness of hard real-time complex jobs

The rapid technological advances have made the use of domestic assistive environments vital in the daily life of elderly and disabled people. A major challenge in an assistive environment is the effective coordination and scheduling of the interdependent tasks required for the analysis and processing of the collected sensory data, in order to timely response to a life-threatening emergency event. These complex jobs are usually scheduled on distributed heterogeneous resources that may be part of a computational grid or cloud. We investigate by simulation the impact of the processor and network heterogeneity on the timeliness of such critical jobs.