Efficient Adaptations of the Non-Blocking Buffer for Event Message Communication between Real-Time Threads

Enabling message communication among concurrent computing threads without relying on mutual exclusion (i.e., locking) is highly desirable in real-time computing systems. This paper presents a refined version of the Non-Blocking Buffer (NBB), which is a lock-free interaction mechanism that enables ef...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kim, K.H., Colmenares, J.A., Kee-Wook Rim
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Concurrent computing
concurrent programming
Design engineering
Distributed computing
event message communication
Middleware
non-blocking algorithms
Operating systems
producer-consumer
Programming profession
Real time systems
real-time computing systems
Refining
Timing
Yarn
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Summary:Enabling message communication among concurrent computing threads without relying on mutual exclusion (i.e., locking) is highly desirable in real-time computing systems. This paper presents a refined version of the Non-Blocking Buffer (NBB), which is a lock-free interaction mechanism that enables efficient event-message communication between a single producer thread and a single consumer thread. The NBB scheme presented here contains improvements over the previous version in two aspects. First, application designers now have the flexibility of choosing the consumer's retry strategy for the case when the buffer is empty but the producer is in the middle of inserting an item. Second, in the refined version the producer inserts pointers to data items into the buffer whereas the consumer obtains copies of the items. This design is consistent with the fact that shared heap management must be avoided to enable fully lock-free interaction between the producer and the consumer. This paper also discusses the approaches based on the NBB mechanism for supporting all conceivable producer-consumer scenarios.
ISSN:1555-0885
2375-5261
DOI:10.1109/ISORC.2007.31