Distributed self-organizing bandwidth allocation for priority-based bus communication

SUMMARY The raising complexity in distributed embedded systems makes it necessary that the communication of such systems organizes itself automatically. In this paper, we tackle the problem of sharing bandwidth on priority‐based buses. Based on a game theoretic model, reinforcement learning algorithms are proposed that use simple local rules to establish bandwidth sharing. The algorithms require little computational effort and no additional communication. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithms establish the desired properties without global knowledge ortextita priori information. It is proven that communication nodes using these algorithms can co‐exist with nodes using other scheduling techniques. Finally, we propose a procedure that helps to set the learning parameters according to the desired behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.