Adaptive traffic scheduling techniques for mixed real-time and streaming applications on reconfigurable hardware

With the ongoing development of new FPGA generations, the reconfiguration time decreases and therefore the benefit of runtime reconfiguration increases. In this paper, we describe how to use runtime reconfiguration to improve the efficiency of transmitting streaming data on a communication channel shared with real-time applications. This means, the bandwidth that the streaming data has available is dynamically changing. To use the bandwidth effectively, different modules can be loaded on the reconfigurable hardware. These modules have a tradeoff between bandwidth and area requirements. The target now is to find an optimal reconfiguration schedule that minimizes an objective function consisting of two conflicting objectives: reducing the average area needed and providing a certain quality of transmission. In this paper, a model for this scheduling problem is presented and an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is introduced to calculate an optimal offline solution for benchmarking. In addition, an online scheduling system is presented. It uses the current delay of the streaming application to calculate the schedule. Extensive simulations have been made to show the benefits of the proposed solution.