A closer look into the AER Model

Commercial-of-the-shelf based multi-core systems present timing anomalies that cannot be ignored by the real-time systems community due to their unpredictable behaviour. These timing anomalies, often caused by applications' uncontrolled accesses to shared resources such as the components in the memory hierarchy or in the I/O subsystem, introduce interference that may lead to deadline misses if the problem is neglected. The Acquisition Execution Restitution (AER) execution model was previously proposed to circumvent this problem and, therefore, mitigate inter-task interference. In this model, applications decouple communication (acquisition and restitution phases) from the actual execution in a way that at most one acquisition or restitution phase is in execution at any instant of time while the execution phase of different tasks can progress in parallel on multiple cores. Thus, keeping each task's derived worst-case execution time closer to the one measured in isolation. In this paper, we study the AER execution model and compare it against a global Earliest Deadline First (EDF) approach where interferences are considered. Our results show that a priority assignment heuristic which assigns the priorities based on the tasks' periods dominates all the other proposed heuristics and that due to interference it can also schedule task sets which are not schedulable by using the global EDF approach.