Scheduling time-constrained tasks in ALE-compliant RFID middleware

Abstract

This paper explores a scheduling problem that must be addressed during the design and implementation of ALE-compliant RFID middleware. Scheduling ALE tasks for reading and writing RFID tags is similar to the classical readers and writers problem, in which writers are mutually exclusive with respect to each other and readers, while readers can run concurrently. However, conventional solutions for the classic readers and writers problem such as ES (Exhaustive Service) and TFE (Threshold Fastest Emptying) policies cannot be directly applied to ALE task scheduling since they were not designed to handle tuning constraints such as deadlines. In this paper, we consider ALE task scheduling as a timeconstrained readers and writers problem and propose a priority-based scheduling solution. Specifically, we propose a static priority scheduling policy and a schedulability analysis method that can be used for testing the schedulability of a given task set under the proposed scheduling policy.