Project Overview:
Scheduling Algorithms for Real-Time Systems


Scheduling real-time transactions is far more complex than traditional real-time scheduling in the sense that 1) worst case execution times are typically hard to estimate, and 2) certain aspects of concurrency control may not integrate well with real-time scheduling. To improve the timeliness, we have started to investigate scheduling and concurrency control methods that allow database systems to meet timing constraints without reducing the concurrency level of the system. We observed that by using a priority-dependent synchronization protocol, the serialization order of active transactions can be adjusted dynamically. This makes it possible for transactions with higher priorities to be executed first, so that high priority transactions are not blocked by uncommitted low priority transactions, while lower priority transactions may not have to be aborted even in face of conflicting operations. The adjustment of the serialization order can be viewed as a mechanism to support time-critical scheduling.

Our effort has resulted in a number of hybrid protocols. Preliminary performance results show that these protocols can be very effective in improving timeliness of real-time database systems. Currently, we are extending the notion of dynamic adjustment of serialization order to apply to distributed scheduling and semantic-based scheduling algorithms. We believe that the extension would produce many useful contributions, since it processes transactions in an optimistic fashion and does not need to support the two-phaseness of locking.





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Last modified: Mon Oct 2 18:34:05 EDT 1995 [SK]