iDSRT: Integrated Dynamic Soft Real-time Architecture for Critical Infrastructure Data Delivery over WLAN

The real-time control data delivery system of the Critical Infrastructure (i.e. SCADA—Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system) is important because appropriate decisions cannot be made without having data delivered in a timely manner. Because these applications use multiple heterogeneous resources such as CPU, network bandwidth and storage, they call for an integrated and coordinated real-time scheduling across multiple resources to meet end-to-end deadlines. We present a design and implementation of iDSRT—an integrated dynamic soft real-time system to provide fine-grained end-to-end delay guarantees over WLAN. iDSRT takes the deadline partitioning approach: end-to-end deadlines are partitioned into multiple sub-deadlines for CPU scheduling and network scheduling. It integrates three important schedulers: task scheduler, packet scheduler and node scheduler to achieve global coordination. We validate iDSRT in Linux and evaluate it in an experimental SCADA test-bed. The results are promising and show that iDSRT can successfully achieve soft real-time guarantees in SCADA system with very low packet loss rate compared to available commodity best-effort systems.