A systematic approach to designing distributed real-time systems

The authors describe the use of generalized rate monotonic scheduling (GRMS) theory for the design and analysis of a distributed real-time system. This theory ensures that as long as the system utilization of all tasks lies below a certain bound, and appropriate scheduling algorithms are used, all tasks will meet their deadlines. This puts the development and maintenance of real-time systems on an analytic, engineering basis making, these systems easier to develop and maintain. The authors review the recent extensions of the theory to distributed systems scheduling and examine the architectural requirements for use of the theory. They provide an application example to demonstrate the benefits of this theory.<>