Distributed Real-Time System Design: Theoretical Concepts and Applications

L. Sha
S. Sathaye

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-93-TR-002

Distributed real-time system design raises new theoretical issues and application challenges, beyond that in centralized systems. Rate monotonic scheduling (RMS) theory has been successfully applied in the scheduling of centralized systems. RMS and its generalizations have been adopted by national high technology projects such as the Space Station and has recently been supported by major open standards such as the IEEE Futurebus+ and POSIX.4. In this paper, we describe the use of generalized rate monotonic scheduling theory for the design and analysis of a distributed real- time system. We review the recent extensions of the theory to distributed system scheduling, examine the architectural requirements for use of the theory, and finally provide an application example.