A Flexible Scheduling Framework for Deeply Embedded Systems

Typical embedded systems must perform rather complex control and communication tasks with severely restricted computing resources. Due to these contraints most systems are single threaded and follow either a time-triggered or event-driven model of computation. Furthermore, most often soft or hard real-time constraints must be obeyed, too. Thus the choice of suitable scheduling policies is a crucial issue. In this paper we present a flexible scheduling framework for such systems that allows the static configuration of scheduling mechanisms and policies according to highly specific application demands. We discuss software engineering issues, provide important implementation details of our scheduling framework and analyse different scheduling schemes.