Comparison of Process Scheduling Methodologies for Embedded Systems

In most of the embedded systems the basic theme is performing multiple tasks periodically. The execution time of each task in such systems is variable. Hence, it is crucial to schedule the tasks in an appropriate manner to guarantee reliable system performance. This paper deals with comparing scheduling methodologies which are commonly used in embedded systems. For this we consider here three methodologies of scheduling superloop, time triggered and using a cooperative scheduler. The parameters of comparison are, ease of implementation, scalability, power consumption, reliability of the system and the total code size. We consider three different processes and try scheduling them using the methodologies, for achieving a efficient method for scheduling. The results have been obtained by implementation of different scheduling methodologies on a microcontroller of MCS51 family using embedded C programming.