Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Frameworks with Utility Function Design for Intermediate Deadline Assignment in Real-Time Distributed Systems

In real-time distributed systems, it is important to provide offline guarantee for an upper-bound of each real-time task’s end-to-end delay, which has been achieved by assigning proper intermediate deadlines of individual real-time tasks at each node. Although existing studies have succeeded to utilize mathematical theories of distributed computation/control for intermediate deadline assignment, they have assumed that every task operates in a cooperative manner, which does not always hold for real-worlds. In addition, existing studies have not addressed how to exploit a trade-off between end-to-end delay fairness among real-time tasks and performance for minimizing aggregate end-to-end delays. In this paper, we recapitulate an existing cooperative distributed framework, and propose a non-cooperate distributed framework that can operate even with selfish tasks, each of which is only interested in minimizing its own end-to-end delay regardless of achieving the system goal. We then propose how to design utility functions that allow the real-time distributed system to exploit the trade-off. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of the cooperative and non-cooperative frameworks along with the designed utility functions, via simulations.