Dual-Priority versus Background Scheduling: A Path-Wise Comparison

In this paper, two well-known scheduling policies for real-time systems, namely background scheduling (BS) and dual-priority (DP) are compared in terms of response times for soft real-time traffic (SRT). It is proved in the preemptive as well as in the non-preemptive case that, when the SRT traffic is FIFO, the DP policy always outperforms BS for all instances of SRT tasks. When the SRT traffic is not FIFO but if all tasks are of equal size then, in the non-preemptive case, the average response times is shown to be always better under DP than under BS. As a complementary result, some non-FIFO examples where BS behaves better than DP for some SRT tasks but also on the average of the SRT response times, are given. The proofs are based on a trajectorial method that may be used for comparing other scheduling policies.