A Scheduling Algorithm for Execution-Instant Sensitive Real-Time Systems

Most of the previous studies on real-time systems focus on the satisfaction of completion-time constraints of jobs. A lot of them consider pure deadline, where the real-time jobs should be completed before their respective deadline. Some others consider time/utility functions for their jobs, which specifies the benefit that a job can accrue according to its exact completion time. However, we propose a different type of timing constraints for real-time jobs called Instant Value Function (IVF). According to IVF, the exact instant where a job is executed affects the value that the job can accrue. Therefore, the IVF specifies that which instants are the most appropriate ones to execute the job. This type of timing constraints can express the behavior of specific applications in a more precise manner. Furthermore, we have presented a scheduling algorithm that tries to maximize the accrued value of real-time systems with IVF-constrained jobs. The experimental results show that the proposed method considerably outperforms EDF.