An Investigation of Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration Offloading in Hard Real-Time Systems

Nowadays, complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) often exploit the so-called computing at the edge (i.e., edge-computing), where the Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR, also known as Dynamic Function eXchange or Partial Reconfiguration) feature has been proved to be efficient to face the adaptivity challenges typical of the CPSs domain. In this context, the increase of both platforms heterogeneity and required customizations are leading to a growth of the number of per-task requested DPR, for which Industry is enhancing the reconfiguration controllers providing the capability to offload more than one DPR request, in turn allowing pipelining between multiple DPR processes and application execution. Several works in literature have introduced the DPR process in the hard real-time system domain, however not considering the multiple DPR offloading capabilities. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis and a practical evaluation of multiple DPR offloading in the context of hard real-time systems. In particular, through a motivational case-study, supported by some experimental activities conducted on the Zynq-7000 SoC, we show how the offload of multiple DPR can provide benefits with respect to the traditional approach of one DPR request per time.