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Dynamic Task Scheduling with Security Awareness in Real-Time Systems

Tao Xie1    Xiao Qin1    Andrew Sung1    Man Lin2    Laurence Yang2

1 Department of Computer Science
   New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
   801 Leroy Place, Socorro, New Mexico 87801
2 Department of Computer Science

St. Francis Xavier University

Antigonish, NS, B2G 2W5, Canada

An increasing number of real-time applications like aircraft control and medical electronics systems require high quality of security to assure confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of information. However, most existing algorithms for scheduling independent tasks in real-time systems do not adequately consider security requirements of real-time tasks. In recognition of this problem we propose a novel dynamic scheduling algorithm with security awareness, which is capable of achieving high security for real-time tasks while improving resource utilization. We conducted extensive simulation experiments to quantitatively evaluate the performance of our approach. Experimental results based on synthetic and real world traces show that compared with three baseline algorithms, the proposed algorithm can consistently improve overall system performance in terms of quality of security and guarantee ratio under a wide range of workload characteristics.

Appeared in International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, Vol. 4, Issue 2, Feb. 2006.