Layered Scheduling: Toward Better Real-Time Lingua Franca

Abstract

Lingua Franca (LF) is a programming paradigm that eases the development of distributed cyber-physical systems and ensures determinism. These systems are subject to stringent timing constraints, generally expressed as task deadlines, and meeting them requires real-time scheduling. This letter presents a layered scheduling strategy for LF for enhanced real-time performance that builds upon any priority-based operating system thread scheduler. The application designers need to specify only the application-specific deadlines, and the LF runtime automatically converts them into appropriate priority values for the OS scheduler to obtain earliest deadline first scheduling.