A binary-tree architecture for scheduling real-time systems with hard and soft tasks

Abstract

Complex real-time systems are required to jointly schedule both periodic and aperiodic tasks. To do this, optimal schedulers are dynamic slack stealing algorithms (DSS). However, these software schedulers are impractical due to their large overheads that always result in delays and reduced CPU utilization. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is doing scheduling in hardware. This paper analyzes in depth a hardware design based on binary trees.