Dynamic Hinting: Real-Time Resource Management in Wireless Sensor/Actor Networks

Increasing complexity of today's WSAN applications can rapidly result in reduced real-time capabilities of the underlying sensor nodes. Using preemptive operating systems is one way to retain acceptable reactivity within highly dynamic environments but commonly leads to severe resource management problems. We present the dynamic hinting approach for maintaining good system reactivity by efficient combination of preemptive task scheduling and cooperative resource allocation. With respect to task priorities, our technique significantly improves classical methods for handling priority inversions under both short- and long-term resource allocations. Furthermore, we facilitate compositional software design by providing independently developed tasks with runtime information for yet collaborative resource sharing. In some cases this even allows to improve blocking delays as otherwise imposed by bounded priority inversion.