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Introduction to the Special Issue on Real-Time, Embedded
and Cyber-Physical Systems
Embedded software has become a necessity in almost every aspect of our daily life. The types of embedded software range from self-contained applications to those embedded in various devices and services, such as mobile phones, vital sign sensors, medica-tion dispensers, home appliances, engine ignimedica-tion systems, etc. Many such systems are mission/life-critical and performance-sensitive. This special issue presents recent ad-vances in embedded computing, real-time computing, and ubiquitous computing, and especially advances jointly among these areas.
This special issue received over forty submissions, including articles extended from their conference versions in the 19th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and
Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (IEEE RTCSA) and other high-quality
submissions worldwide. All of the submissions were reviewed by at least 3 reviewers with particular expertise in the subject area of the article. Among the submissions, eight articles were selected to appear in this special issue. The selected articles cover three topics: embedded system architectures, real-time scheduling algorithms, and cyber-physical system designs.
The first three articles address embedded architecture design and energy efficiency. The article Branch Prediction-Directed Dynamic Instruction Cache Locking for
Em-bedded Systems by K. Qiu et al. presents a cache-locking technique for improving
the average-case execution time performance of embedded applications. The article
A Hybrid Storage Access Framework for High-Performance Virtual Machines by C.-K.
Kang et al. introduces a hybrid storage access framework for a virtualization environ-ment to improve I/O performance using solid-state drives. The article Energy Efficiency
Analysis for the Single Frequency Approximation (SFA) Scheme by Pagani and Chen
presents a comprehensive analysis for SFA and shows the usefulness of SFA under practical settings.
The next three articles focus on real-time scheduling. The article Task
Assign-ment Algorithms for Heterogeneous Multiprocessors by Raravi and N´elis presents two
algorithms for assigning real-time tasks on a t-type heterogeneous multiprocessor with performance guarantees. The article Provably Good Task Assignment for Two-Type
Het-erogeneous Multiprocessors Using Cutting Planes by Andersson and Raravi considers
the problem of determining a task-to-processor assignment for an implicit deadline spo-radic task set on a two-type heterogeneous multiprocessor. The article Optimal Priority
Assignment to Control Tasks by Mancuso et al. addresses the problem of determining
the optimal priority assignments and the periods of sample-data control tasks.
The last two articles are on cyber-physical system design. The article Utility-Based
Resource Overbooking for Cyber-Physical Systems by de Niz et al. proposes ZS-QRAM,
a scheduling approach that enables the use of flexible execution times and application-derived utility to tasks in order to maximize total system utility. The article
Schedul-ing Temporal Data with Dynamic Snapshot Consistency Requirement in Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems by Liu et al. investigates both static and dynamic snapshot
consistency requirements for temporal data dissemination in vehicular cyber-physical systems.
We would like to thank all of the authors who submitted their excellent work to this special issue and the reviewers for their great efforts in reviewing the submissions
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2014 ACM 1539-9087/2014/09-ART155 $15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2660488
155:2 L.-P. Chang et al.
and applying their high standards to them. We also thank the former Editor-in-Chief of ACM TECS, Professor J¨org Henkel, and the current Editor-in-Chief of ACM TECS, Professor Sandeep K. Shukla, for their guidance and timely help throughout the entire organizing and reviewing process for this special issue.
Li-Pin Chang National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan [email protected] Tei-Wei Kuo Academia Sinica & National Taiwan University, Taiwan [email protected] Chris Gill Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA [email protected] Jin Nakazawa Keio University, Japan [email protected]
Guest Editors
