Improving Run-Time Memory Utilization of Component-based Embedded Systems with Non-Critical Functionality

Many contemporary embedded systems have to deal with huge amount of data, coming from the interaction with the environment, due to their data-intensive applications. However, due to some inherent properties of these systems, such as limited energy and resources (compute and storage), it is important that the resources should be used in an efficient way. For example, camera sensors of a robot may provide low-resolution frames for positioning itself in an open environment, and high-resolution frames to analyze detected objects. Component-based software development techniques and models have proven to be efficient for the development of these systems. Many component models used in the industry (e.g., Rubus, IEC 61131) allocate, at the system initialization, enough resources to satisfy the demands of the system's critical functionality. These resources are retained by the critical functionality even when they are not fully utilized. In this paper, we introduce a method that, when possible, distributes the unused memory of the critical functionality to the non-critical functionality in order to improve its performance. The method uses a monitoring solution that checks the memory utilization, and triggers the memory distribution whenever possible. As a proof of concept, we realize the proposed method in an industrial component model. As an evaluation, we use an underwater robot case study to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed solution.