Real-Time and Embedded Computing Systems and Applications

Garbage collection has not been widely used in embedded real-time applications since traditional real-time garbage collection algorithm can hardly bound its worst-case responsiveness. To overcome this limitation, we have proposed a scheduling-integrated real-time garbage collection algorithm based on the single aperiodic server in our previous work. This paper introduces a new scheduling-aware real-time garbage collection which employs two aperiodic servers for garbage collection work. Our study aims at achieving similar performance compared with the single server approach whilst relaxing the limitation of the single server approach. In our scheme, garbage collection requests are scheduled using the preset CPU bandwidth of aperiodic server such as the sporadic server and the deferrable server. In the dual server scheme, most garbage collection work is serviced by the secondary server at low priority level. The effectiveness of our approach is verified by analytic results and extensive simulation based on the trace-driven data. Performance analysis demonstrates that the dual server scheme shows similar performance compared with the single server approach while it allows flexible system design.