Real-time network functions for the Internet of Things
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Date
2017-06-26
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Student Paper
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yes
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Abstract
The Internet of Things is evolving, more and more devices are getting connected,
more data exchanged and increasingly complex tasks are handled by these net-
works. Especially, low-power wireless communication networks are widely used
due to the flexibility and fast deployment with a battery. The networks must
be at low cost and still guarantee a long battery life time and compute a com-
plex task. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the outsourcing of a potentially
complex task, e.g. real-time scheduling, to another processor and enable a real-
time functionality for the whole network. The goal is a proof of concepts of
the scheduler outsourcing by evaluating the implementation at the system-level,
combining hardware, scheduler and network protocol.
Many algorithms to support real-time functionalities are already developed,
but the implementation for existing low-power systems with a single processor is
difficult. Low power systems with a single core are often resource limited in
memory and computational power. Multiple processors can be used to overcome
this problem, but challenges with the interprocessor communication arises. The
Dual-Processor Platform (DPP) enables a partition of the tasks between a
very low-power communication processor (CP) and more powerful application
processor (AP). The CP will be used to handle wireless communication based
on the Low-power Wireless Bus (LWB), which is a best-effort network pro-
tocol. The Blink scheduler is used to enable the real-time functionality in
the network. The potentially complex and memory demanding Blink scheduler
is outsourced to the AP. Further, the LWB round structure is adapted, which
leverages the DPP platform and allows the computation of the next schedule
on the AP while the communication is ongoing on the CP. Therefore, the delay
for outsourcing the scheduler is becoming neglectable when the wireless network
communication has sufficient many slots per round. In the end, the limitations
like additional interprocessor communication delays are analysed and potential
improvements are evaluated.
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published
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Contributors
Examiner: Jacob, Romain
Examiner : Thiele, Lothar
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Publisher
ETH Zurich
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Subject
IoT; Embedded Systems; Real-Time Systems
Organisational unit
03429 - Thiele, Lothar (emeritus) / Thiele, Lothar (emeritus)