Abstract
Distributed real-time systems implemented networked applications with timeliness requirements. Such systems must deliver correct values over a network within bounded time. A critical resource in a distributed real-time system is its shared communication medium. Due to the system's decentralized nature, any connected node can access the medium anytime and can cause collisions, which scramble data and typically result in retransmissions. Since such collisions reduce the system's reliability and change timing behaviour, one primary research goal in this area is to provide effective coordination models for controlling access to the shared medium and its channels. In this talk, I will present state-based communication scheduling and its implementation through Network Code. State-based communication schedules are a powerful, expressive mechanism to program adaptive, but still verifiable, communication behavior. I will introduce the underlying concepts, show its application on a NetFPGA and a medical device case study, and discuss lessons learnt over the course of working on this topic.
Biography
Sebastian Fischmeister is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He received his MASc in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and his Ph.D. degree at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He was subsequently awarded the APART stipend for young, excellent researchers in 2005 and worked at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, as Post Graduate Research Associate until 2008. He performs systems research at the intersection of software technology, distributed systems, and formal methods. His preferred application areas are distributed embedded real-time systems in the domain of automotive systems and medical devices. He is now working on the theory and application of state-based schedules for adaptive systems and a debugging/tracing framework for time-sensitive systems.