Dynamic Real-time Scheduling of Firm Periodic Tasks with Hard and Soft Aperiodic Tasks

In this paper, we address the problem of the dynamic scheduling of skippable periodic task sets (i.e., period tasks allowing occasional skips of instances), together with aperiodic tasks. Scheduling of tasks is handled thanks to the merging of two existing approaches: the Skip-Over task model and the EDL (Earliest Deadline as Late as possible) aperiodic task server. The objective is to provide two on-line scheduling algorithms, namely EDL-RTO and EDL-BWP, in order to minimize the average response time of soft aperiodic requests, while ensuring that the QoS (Quality of Service) of periodic tasks will never be less than a specified bound. We also extend our results to the acceptance of sporadic tasks (i.e., aperiodic tasks with deadlines). We show that these novel scheduling algorithms have better performance compared to related algorithms regarding aperiodic response time and acceptance ratio. Audrey Marchand guaduated in Computer Engineering at the Ecole polytechnique of the University of Nantes (France), in 2002. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Nantes. Her research interests include real-time scheduling theory, aperiodic service mechanisms, quality of service guarantees in soft real-time systems, and Linux-based real-time operating systems and applications. Maryline Chetto received the degree of Docteur de 3ème cycle in control engineering and the degree of Habilitée à Diriger des Recherches in Computer Science from the University of Nantes, France, in 1984 and 1993, respectively. From 1984 to 1985, she held the position of Assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Rennes, while her research was with the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires, Rennes. In 1986, she returned to Nantes and is currently a professor with the Institute of Technology of the University of Nantes. She is conducting her research at IRCCyN. Her main research interests include scheduling and fault-tolerance technologies for real-time applications. She has published more than 60 journal articles and conference papers in the area of real-time operating systems. She is the leader of a French national R&D project, namely Cleopatre, supported by the French government, which aims to provide free open source real-time solutions.