Real-time task reconfiguration support applied to an UAV-based surveillance system

Modern surveillance systems, such as those based on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, require powerful high- performance platforms to deal with many different algorithms that make use of massive calculations. At the same time, low- cost and high-performance specific hardware (e.g., GPU, PPU) are rising and the CPUs turned to multiple cores, characteriz- ing together an interesting and powerful heterogeneous execu- tion platform. Therefore, reconfigurable computing is a poten- tial paradigm for those scenarios as it can provide flexibility to explore the computational resources on heterogeneous cluster attached to a high-performance computer system platform. As the first step towards a run-time reconfigurable workload bal- ancing framework targeting that kind of platform, application time requirements and its crosscutting behavior play an impor- tant role for task allocation decisions. This paper presents a strategy to reallocate specific tasks in a surveillance system composed by a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using aspect- oriented paradigms in order to address non-functional applica- tion timing constraints in the design phase. An aspect support from a framework called DERAF is used to support reconfigu- ration requirements and provide the resource information needed by the reconfigurable load-balancing strategy. Finally, for the case study, a special attention on Radar Image Process- ing will be given.