A deferrable scheduling algorithm for real-time transactions maintaining data freshness

Periodic update transaction model has been used to maintain freshness (or temporal validity) of real-time data. Period and deadline assignment has been the main focus in the past studies such as the More-Less scheme [22] in which update transactions are guaranteed by the Deadline Monotonic scheduling algorithm [13] to complete by their deadlines. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm, namely deferrable scheduling, for minimizing imposed workload while maintaining temporal validity of real-time data. In contrast to previous work, update transactions scheduled by the deferrable scheduling algorithm follow a sporadic task model. The deferrable scheduling algorithm exploits the semantics of temporal validity constraint of real-time data by judiciously deferring the sampling times of update transaction jobs as late as possible. We present a theoretical analysis of its processor utilization, which is verified in our experiments. Our experimental results also demonstrate that the deferrable scheduling algorithm is a very effective approach, and it significantly outperforms the More-Less scheme in terms of reducing processor workload.