Can Android be used for real-time purposes?

Android is thought as being yet another operating system! In reality, it is a software platform rather than just an OS; in practical terms, it is an application framework on top of Linux, which facilitates its rapid deployment in many domains. Android was originally designed to be used in mobile com...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2012 International Conference on Computer Systems and Industrial Informatics pp. 1 - 6
Main Authors Perneel, L., Fayyad-Kazan, H., Timmerman, M.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.12.2012
Subjects
Androids
Clocks
Humanoid robots
Kernel
Linux
Real-time systems
Switches
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Summary:Android is thought as being yet another operating system! In reality, it is a software platform rather than just an OS; in practical terms, it is an application framework on top of Linux, which facilitates its rapid deployment in many domains. Android was originally designed to be used in mobile computing applications, from handsets to tablets to e-books. But developers are also looking to employ Android in a variety of other embedded systems that have traditionally relied on the benefits of true real-time operating systems performance, boot-up time, real-time response, reliability, and no hidden maintenance costs. In this paper, we present a preliminary conclusion about Android's real-time behavior and performance based on experimental measurements such as thread switch latency, interrupt latency, sustained interrupt frequency, and finally the behavior of mutex and semaphore. All these measurements were done on the same ARM platform (Beagleboard-XM). Our testing results showed that Android in its current state cannot be qualified to be used in real-time environments.
ISBN:9781467351553
1467351555
DOI:10.1109/ICCSII.2012.6454350