Utilization-based delay guarantee techniques and their applications

Many real-time systems demand effective and efficient delay-guaranteed services to meet timing requirements of their applications. We note that a system provides a delay-guaranteed service if the system can ensure that each task will meet its predefined end-to-end deadline. Admission control plays a critical role in providing delayguaranteed services. The major function of admission control is to determine admissibility of a new task. A new task will be admitted into the system if the deadline of all existing tasks and the new task can be met. Admission control has to be efficient and efficient, meaning that a decision should be made quickly while admitting the maximum number of tasks. In this dissertation, we study a utilization-based admission control mechanism. Utilization-based admission control makes an admission decision based on a simple resource utilization test: A task will be admitted if the resource utilization is lower than a pre-derived safe resource utilization bound. The challenge of obtaining a safe resource utilization bound is how to perform delay analysis offline, which is the main focus of this dissertation. For this, we develop utilization-based delay guarantee techniques to render utilization-based admission control both efficient and effective, which is further confirmed with our data. We develop techniques for several systems that are of practical importance. We first consider wired networks with the Differentiated Services model, which is wellknown as its supporting scalable services in computer networks. We consider both cases of providing deterministic and statistical delay-guaranteed services in wired networks with the Differentiated Services model. We will then extend our work to wireless networks, which have become popular for both civilian and mission critical applications. The variable service capacity of a wireless link presents more of a challenge in providing delay-guaranteed services in wireless networks. Finally, we study ways to provide delayguaranteed services in component-based systems, which now serve as an important platform for developing a new generation of computer software. We show that with our utilization-based delay guarantee technique, component-based systems can provide efficient and effective delay-guaranteed services while maintaining such advantages as the reusability of components.