Response Time Bounds for DAG Tasks with Arbitrary Intra-Task Priority Assignment

Most parallel real-time applications can be modeled as directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks. Intra-task priority assignment can reduce the nondeterminism of runtime behavior of DAG tasks, possibly resulting in a smaller worst-case response time. However, intra-task priority assignment incurs dependencies between different parts of the graph, making it a challenging problem to compute the response time bound. Existing work on intra-task task priority assignment for DAG tasks is subject to the constraint that priority assignment must comply with the topological order of the graph, so that the response time bound can be computed in polynomial time. In this paper, we relax this constraint and propose a new method to compute response time bound of DAG tasks with arbitrary priority assignment. With the benefit of our new method, we present a simple but effective priority assignment policy, leading to smaller response time bounds. Comprehensive evaluation with both single-DAG systems and multi-DAG systems demonstrates that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with a considerable margin