Comparison of Generally Applicable Mechanisms for Preventing Embedded Event-Driven Real-Time Systems from Interrupt Overloads

This paper is related to event-driven embedded systems whose function can be divided into the real-time (RT) and non-RT parts. Such a system must be designed so that all predetermined timing constraints are met at runtime, even in adverse conditions such as an excessive rate of events caused by interrupts. In other words, the RT part is expected not to fail because of its criticality. In the paper, the interrupt overload problem is introduced, then typical generally applicable solutions to the problem are presented along with our hardware/software architecture for preventing the RT part from the problem; finally, the solutions are compared to summarize their attributes from the RT point of view.