Using Fixed Priority Pre-emptive Scheduling in Real-Time Systems

For real-time applications, task scheduling is a problem of paramount importance. Several scheduling algorithms were proposed in the literature, starting from static scheduling or cyclic executives which provide very deterministic yet inflexible behaviour, to the so called best-effort scheduling, which facilitates maximum run-time flexibility but allows only probabilistic predictions of run-time performance presenting a non-predictable and nondeterministic solution. Between these two extremes lies fixed priority scheduling algorithms, such as Rate Monotonic, that is not so efficient for real-time purposes but exhibits a predictable approach because scheduling is doing offline and guarantees regarding process deadlines could be obtained using appropriate analysis methods. This paper investigates the use of Rate Monotonic algorithm by making adjustments in order to make it more suitable for real-time applications. The factors that motivate the interest for fixed priority scheduling algorithms such Rate Monotonic when doing with real-time systems lies in its associated analysis that could be oriented in two directions: schedulability analysis and analysis of process interactions. The analyzing process is carried out using a previously implemented framework that allows modelling, simulation and schedulability analysis for a set of real-time system tasks, and some of the results obtained are presented.