Explicit prioritization of parallel Intent broadcasts in real-time Android

Different approaches for extending the original Android platform with real-time capabilities were presented in the last few years. Most of the work covers fundamental issues like real-time scheduling and non-blocking memory management. This article shows the weak predictability of Android's internal intra-process and inter-process communication based on Intent messaging and presents a concept to improve its soft real-time capability. The proposed approach introduces a priority-based broadcast handling using explicit priority values, instead of the original first in - first out processing. Furthermore, the size of responsible critical sections is reduced in order to improve the preemptibility and to assure predictable processing times for applications with real-time requirements. Our evaluation highlights the improvements in comparison with the original Android implementation without any loss of the system performance. Additionally, the compatibility with already existing components and applications is preserved. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.