Real Time Systems

SIM BATCH
(Assignment Problems)

Q1. Consider the following embedded system used for controlling a seeing, hearing and moving robot.
The system must remove a frame from the video camera (which takes 5 ms) every 50 ms. At least one out
of every four frames must be checked to make sure that the robot will not crash into a wall. This check
will take 30 ms. The system must examine a sound capture buffer every 70 ms and decide whether it has
been told to stop. This takes 10 ms. The system checks whether the robots feet are in water once every
120 ms and safely shuts itself down if they are. This takes 40 ms.
Assume that you have a preemptive, priority driven scheduler with fixed priorities.
a. Show that the system is schedulable.
b. The designers would like to make the robot more robust by augmenting the frame checking to
avoid water as well as walls. However, this will increase the time required for frame checking to
80 ms, without changing the timing requirements. Is the work still schedulable? Prove your
answer. You are free to apply transformations to the task set.

Q2. An operating system provides 256 fixed priorities to threads in the system, but only 32 priorities
levels for their messages exchanged through message queues. Suppose that each sending thread chooses
the priority of its messages by mapping the 256 thread priority levels to 32 message priority levels.
Discuss some potential problems associated with this uniform mapping scheme. What kind of approach
would you take?

Q3. For the following kinds of systems give your best recommendation as to the most likely
commercial real-time operating system to use based on the selection criteria you developed.
(a) A controller application for the fuel injection system of a passenger car.
(b) A hand-held game application.
(c) A medical device that reduces the time needed for an MRI scan.
.
Q4. Using a data flow diagram, capture the data and functional requirements for monitoring entry,exit and
traversal of planes in an airspace. Planes entering the space are sensed by the Radar input; the Comm
input identifies planes that leave the space. The current contents of the space are maintained in the data
area Airspace Status. A log or history of the space is kept in the Airspace Log storage. An air traffic
controller can request the display of the status of a particular plane through the Controller} input.