The variability arising from sophisticated hardware and software solutions in cutting-edge embedded products causes software to exhibit complex execution time distributions. Mixture distributions can happen, with different density (weight), as a result of inherent different features in the execution platform and multiple operational scenarios. In the context of probabilisticWCET (pWCET) analysis based on Extreme Value Theory (EVT), where identical distribution is a pre-requisite, mixtures are typically intercepted by applying stationarity tests on the full sample. Those tests, however, are instructed to detect only mixtures with sufficiently high probability (weight) and disregard low-density mixtures (which are unlikely to be preserved in the high-quantile tail of the sample) as they would prevent any form of stationarity. Nonetheless, low-density mixture distributions can persist and even exacerbate in the tail, and, when not considered, they can impair pWCET estimation in EVT-based approaches, leading to overly pessimistic or optimistic bounds. In this work, we propose TailID, an iterative point-wise approach that builds on the asymptotic convergence of the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) of the Extreme Value Index (EVI) parameter. to detect low-density mixture distributions on high-quantile tails and use this information to steer EVT tail selection. The benefits of the proposed method are assessed on synthetic mixture distributions and real data collected on an industrially representative embedded platform.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) operating in remote or field scenarios often face limited local processing capacity, necessitating complex real-time monitoring and control via remote processing through mobile edge networks, satellite systems, or UAVs. With recent advancements, UAVs are increasingly being favored for such applications, particularly in isolated areas beyond edge or satellite network coverage. This paper presents a unified UAV scheduling and routing framework for executing geographically distributed real-time CPS tasks under both periodic and aperiodic arrival models. We address the challenge of minimizing the number of UAVs required while ensuring strict adherence to task deadlines across diverse temporal and spatial settings. At first, we propose an efficient heuristic strategy called UAV Scheduling and Routing Algorithm for Real-time Tasks - Periodic Arrivals ( USRART - P), which decomposes applications into task instances and sequentially creates per-UAV routes and schedules within a hyperperiod, maximizing the number of task instances each UAV can cover while meeting deadlines. Adapting to this framework, we develop two additional variants to handle aperiodic CPS tasks: USRART - SA for Synchronous Aperiodic Arrivals (common arrival time, distinct deadlines) and USRART - AA for Asynchronous Aperiodic Arrivals (distinct but known arrival times and deadlines). For the case of periodic tasks, we frame the problem as a constraint optimization formulation which aims to minimize the number of UAVs that are required to generate static hyperperiodic travel routes with task execution schedules for all UAVs, and discuss how the formulation can be adapted for aperiodic tasks. Solution to this formulation using standard off-the-shelf solvers achieves optimality but incurs high computational overheads. Through extensive simulations, we show that USRART exhibits high performance across diverse operational scenarios, varying task distributions, execution demands, and spatial layouts. The results emphasize USRART's flexibility and effectiveness in real-world UAV-based CPS scenarios, especially in environments with limited resources and infrastructure.
Real-time systems are required to produce correct responses which also need to be on time. Two methods to verify the timeliness of the results are the compositional performance analysis and the real-time calculus. Both methods use bounds as inputs from which they derive bounds for the timeliness. Therefore, it is preferable to have better bounds for the inputs. Any of these bounds may contain pessimism. Because both methods use a modular/compositional approach for distributed real-time systems, the pessimism in the bounds accumulate. Therefore, it is desirable to keep the pessimism as low as possible. In this work we investigate distributed real-time systems where tasks have an activation dependency, i. e., the activation of one task depends on the termination of a job of another task. Specifically, we compare the derived bound of how frequent the jobs of a task terminate and subsequently how frequent the activation dependent task activates and releases its jobs. Our contribution is a formal comparison of these bounds that the compositional performance analysis and the real-time calculus derive by means of a mathematical proof. We show that for identical inputs the real-time calculus derives a bound that is not worse than the bound that the compositional performance analysis derives for a single module/component. The mathematical proof also removes any uncertainty that existing empirical comparisons of these bounds may contain.
Trusted execution environments (TEE) represent a major technological breakthrough that provide strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees for code and data running on potentially vulnerable or untrustworthy computing systems, such as cloud, edge, embedded, mobile, or even blockchain systems. However, the performance overhead associated with TEEs still poses a limitation on the extent to which real-time (RT) sensitive applications can benefit from this technology, e.g., to run on untrusted third-party infrastructures. This work investigates various TEE-based architectures spanning from process-based to virtual-machine-based implementations, for securing RT applications. It offers in addition an in-depth evaluation of these architectures, providing insights into how various TEE deployments influence the temporal compute and communication guarantees of RT systems.
