Hartstone distributed benchmark: requirements and definitions

A series of benchmark requirements, the Hartstone distributed benchmark (HDB), to be used in testing the ability of real-time distributed systems (RTDSs), to handle real-time applications, is defined. The HDB experiments deliver figures of merit for the end-to-end scheduling of messages, which integrates the processor scheduling domain and the communication scheduling domain. In the HDB experiments, the entire communication system on each node (hardware and communication software) is presented in the host processor space as a communication server (CS). The CS is reviewed in the processor space as an aperiodic server task which executes on behalf of its clients. The HDB experiments are defined for datagram (acknowledged and unacknowledged) services, virtual-circuit services and integrated protocol services. Experiments for aperiodic activities are defined as well. Dedicated experiments are defined for testing the channel-access protocol, whose serializing nature can lead to priority inversions in the communication media.<<ETX>>