Minimum Bandwidth Reservations for Periodic Streams in Wireless Real-Time Systems

Reservation-based (as opposed to contention-based) channel access in WLANs provides predictable and deterministic transmission and is therefore able to provide timeliness guarantees for wireless and embedded real-time applications. Also, reservation-based channel access is energy-efficient since a wireless adaptor is powered on only during its exclusive channel access times. While scheduling for Quality of Service at the central authority (e.g., base station) has received extensive attention, the problem of determining the actual resource requirements of an individual node in a wireless real-time system has been largely ignored. This work aims at finding the minimum channel bandwidth reservation that meets the real-time constraints of all periodic streams of a given node. Keeping the bandwidth reservation of a node to a minimum leads to reduced energy and resource requirements and leaves more bandwidth for future reservations by other nodes. To obtain a solution to the minimum bandwidth reservation problem, we transform it to a generic uniprocessor task schedulability problem, which is then addressed using a generic algorithm. This algorithm works for a subclass of priority-driven packet scheduling policies, including three common ones: fixed-priority, EDF, and FIFO. Moreover, we then specialize the generic algorithm to these three policies according to their specific characteristics. Their computation complexities and bandwidth reservation efficiencies are evaluated and guidelines for choosing scheduling policies and stream parameters are presented.