Static multiprocessor scheduling of periodic real-time tasks with precedence constraints and communication costs

The problem of allocating and scheduling realtime tasks, with Precedence Constraints and Communication Costs, on a multiprocessor architecture in order to meet the timing constraints is known to be NP-complete. Due to the growing complexity of real-time applications there is a need to find scheduling methods that can handle large task sets in a reasonable time. Also, scheduling methods should consider precedence and exclusion relations in order to support parallelism within tasks and to resolve mutual exclusion situations. In this paper four heuristic scheduling algorithms are developed and evaluated. In particular clustering vs. non-clustering techniques are investigated with some interesting results.