Can fixed priority scheduling work in practice?

Mobile phones serve as platforms for a variety of mobile applications including text and picture messaging as well as personal information management, including data synchronization with remote servers and desktop computers. They also host a range of communication-centered applications most of which have real-time constraints. To improve the performance of the mobile phone software, we focused on the runtime software architecture - a partition of all software functions into concurrent units and a scheduling policy that delivers the best possible service to the user with available resources. The units of concurrency in most products are operating system tasks. Thus, partition of software into tasks and allocation of functionality to tasks in the form of objects or functions are the most important decisions in the design of the runtime architecture (Ran et al., 2003). In this paper, we focus on the scheduling policy and its parameters. Some problems encountered in our project can be solved by a different task design. However, task redesign often is not feasible in industrial setting since it takes a long time and has high costs.