Reliable real-time task scheduler based on Rocket Queue architecture

This paper presents the design of an improved task scheduler for real-time and safety-critical systems, where it is important to deal with real-time requirements and reliability requirements simultaneously. The proposed scheduler implements EDF algorithm for the optimal scheduling of hard real-time tasks, which is essential for real-time operating systems. The proposed task scheduler allows removing any task from the queue according to task ID and regardless of the actual position of the task within the queue, which is important for flexibility of the scheduler for its future extensions. Both operations of the scheduler, i.e. task adding and task killing take always constant time (two clock cycles) to execute regardless of the actual or the maximum number of tasks within the scheduler. The scheduler was verified using simplified version of UVM and applying millions of instructions with randomly generated sort values. The scheduler, implemented in a form of a coprocessor, was synthesized into Intel FPGA Cyclone V with 100 MHz clock frequency. There are two improvements proposed that can significantly reduce resource costs of the scheduler, which is achieved by replacing static deadlines with dynamic deadlines and using a new Rocket Queue architecture for sorting of the tasks according to their deadline values. When both improvements are applied simultaneously, the total ALM cost savings are in the range from 42,59% to 60,18% and the total amount of registers is reduced by 73,74% to 74,87%, depending on the scheduler capacity. The spared resources are then used for implementation of two different variations of TMR in order to increase fault tolerance of the scheduler. The resource cost reductions achieved also indirectly increase the reliability of such scheduler because of reduced probability that a fault occurs.