An Approach to the Design of a Rate Monotonic Scheduler for Real-Time Systems

Rate Monotonic Scheduling is one of the well known fixed-priority driven scheduling algorithms for real time systems. However, not many well known real time operating systems directly provide this scheduler, although almost all of them provide some form of pre-emptive, priority driven scheme. The design of any real time system hinges on time being considered as one of the important design parameters. Thus, time can be thought of as a resource shared among various running tasks in the system just like any other conventional physical resource. Semaphores have been suggested as mechanisms used to control access to resources. In this paper, this idea of resource sharing has been applied using semaphores, where the resource is time, and the concept has been applied to design a Rate Monotonic Scheduler.