Design and Implementation of Holistic Scheduling and Efficient Storage for FlexRay

FlexRay is a new industry standard for next-generation communication in automotives. Though there are a few recent researches on performance analysis of FlexRay, two important aspects of the FlexRay design have been overlooked. The first is a holistic integrated scheduling scheme that can handle both static and dynamic segments in a FlexRay network. The second is cost-effective and scalable performance. To address these aspects, we propose a novel holistic scheduling scheme, called HOSA, which can provide scalable performance by using flexible and ease-of-use dual channel communication in FlexRay. HOSA is built upon a novel slot pilfering technique to schedule and optimize the available slots in both static and dynamic segments. Moreover, to achieve efficient implementation, we propose approximate computation, which can efficiently support cost-effective and holistic scheduling by judiciously obtaining the tradeoff between computation complexity and available pilfered slots. HOSA hence offers the salient feature of improving bandwidth utilization. Moreover, to deliver high performance and bridge the gap between real-time communications in networks and storage management in end devices, we implement a deduplication-aware scheme in a real SSD prototype that can reduce space overhead and extend SSD lifespan (by significantly reducing duplicate write operations). The deduplication scheme meets the needs of message updates in FlexRay. Extensive experiments based on synthetic test cases and real-world case studies demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of HOSA.