Share-Driven Scheduling of Embedded Networks

Many products are built from more or less independently developed subsystems. For instance, a car consists of subsystems for transmission, braking, suspension, etc. These subsystems are frequently controlled by an embedded computer system. In the automotive industry, as well as in other application domains, there is currently a trend from an approach where subsystems have dedicated computer hardware and other resources (a federated approach) to an approach where subsystems share hardware and other resources (an integrated approach). This is motivated by a strong pressure to reduce product cost, at the same time as an increasing number of subsystems are being introduced. When integrating subsystems, it is desirable that guarantees valid before integration are also valid after integration, since this would eliminate the need for costly reverifications. The computer network is a resource that is typically shared among all subsystems. Hence, a central issue when integrating subsystems is to provide an efficient scheduling of message transmissions on the network. There are essentially three families of schedulers that can be used: priority-driven schedulers that assign priorities to messages, time-driven schedulers that assign specific time-slots for transmission of specific messages, and share-driven schedulers that assign shares of the available network capacity to groups of messages. This thesis presents a framework for share-driven scheduling, to be implemented and used in embedded networks, with the aim to facilitate subsystem integration by reducing the risk of interference between subsystems. The framework is applied in the automotive domain. The initial parts of the thesis give an overview of systems, subsystems and network technologies found and used in the automotive domain. Then, the share-driven scheduling framework is presented, analytically investigated and proven, as well as evaluated in a simulation study. Finally it is shown how the framework is to be configured and used in the context of subsystem integration. The results show that the framework allows for flexible and efficient scheduling of messages with real-time constraints, facilitating integration of subsystems from a network point of view