RTDroid: A Design for Real-Time Android

This paper presents our work on the inception of RTDroid, a variant of Android that provides predictability to Android applications. Although there has been much interest in adopting Android in real-time contexts, surprisingly little work has been done to examine the suitability of the Android franework layer for real-time systems. Existing work only provides solutions to traditional problems, including adding support for real-time garbage collection at the virtual machine layer as well as kernel-level real-time scheduling and resource management. While it is critical to address these issues, it is by no means sufficient. After all, Android is a vast system that is more than a Java virtual machine and a kernel. Thus, this paper goes beyond existing work and examines the internals of Android, the Android programming model, libraries, and core systems services. We discuss the implications and challenges of adapting Android constructs and core system services for real-time and present a solution for each. Our system is unique in that it redesigns Androids internal components, replaces Androids Dalvik VM with a real-time VM, and leverages off-the-shelf real-time OSes. We demonstrate the feasibility and predictability of our solution on three different platforms. The evaluation results show that our design can successfully provide predictability to Android applications even under heavy loads.