VIRTUALIZATION STRATEGIES FOR MIXED-CRITICALITY REAL-TIME SYSTEMS

Abstract

The increasing complexity of embedded systems in domains such as automotive, avionics, and industrial control has led to the integration of applications with varying levels of criticality on a shared hardware platform. This paradigm, known as Mixed-Criticality Systems (MCS), poses significant challenges in ensuring strong temporal isolation and safety guarantees. Virtualization has emerged as a key technology to address these challenges by enabling logical separation between safety-critical and non-critical tasks while maintaining performance and resource efficiency. The findings highlight the trade-offs between isolation strength, system performance, and implementation complexity across virtualization strategies. These insights serve as a valuable guideline for system designers aiming to deploy mixed-criticality workloads in safety-certified real-time environments.