Evaluating virtualization for fog monitoring of real-time applications in mixed-criticality systems

Abstract Technological advances in embedded systems and the advent of fog computing led to improved quality of service of applications of cyber-physical systems. In fact, the deployment of such applications on powerful and heterogeneous embedded systems, such as multiprocessors system-on-chips (MPSoCs), allows them to meet latency requirements and real-time operation. Highly relevant to the industry and our reference case-study, the challenging field of nuclear fusion deploys the aforementioned applications, involving high-frequency control with hard real-time and safety constraints. The use of fog computing and MPSoCs is promising to achieve safety, low latency, and timeliness of such control. Indeed, on one hand, applications designed according to fog computing distribute computation across hierarchically organized and geographically distributed edge devices, enabling timely anomaly detection during high-frequency sampling of time series, and, on the other hand, MPSoCs allow leveraging fog computing and integrating monitoring by deploying tasks on a flexible platform suited for mixed-criticality software, leading to so-called mixed criticality systems (MCSs). However, the integration of such software on the same MPSoC opens challenges related to predictability and reliability guarantees, as tasks interfering with each other when accessing the same shared MPSoC resources may introduce non-deterministic latency, possibly leading to failures on account of deadline overruns. Addressing the design, deployment, and evaluation of MCSs on MPSoCs, we propose a model-based system development process that facilitates the integration of real-time and monitoring software on the same platform by means of a formal notation for modeling the design and deployment of MPSoCs. The proposed notation allows developers to leverage embedded hypervisors for monitoring real-time applications and guaranteeing predictability by isolation of hardware resources. Providing evidence of the feasibility of our system development process and evaluating the industry-relevant class of nuclear fusion applications, we experiment with a safety-critical case-study in the context of the ITER nuclear fusion reactor. Our experimentation involves the design and evaluation of several prototypes deployed as MCSs on a virtualized MPSoC, showing that deployment choices linked to the monitor placement and virtualization configurations (e.g., resource allocation, partitioning, and scheduling policies) can significantly impact the predictability of MCSs in terms of Worst-Case Execution Times and other related metrics.