Guest editor's introduction: 1997 IEEE real-time technologies and applications symposium
R. Rajkumar · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2000
—————————— ✦ —————————— 1I NTRODUCTION EAL-TIME systems are computing and communication systems that must deliver their services in timely fashion. Typically, these systems monitor, control, and interact with their physical environment. Classical real-time systems include feedback control systems, radar signal processing systems, avionics and space-based systems. The advent of human-friendly data types in digital computing and communications in the form of voice, audio, and video traffic introduced real-time computing to the mainstream. Two recent trends have accelerated this trend in recent years. First, the ongoing convergence of data communications, telephony, and entertainment demands that the tight timing constraints required by telephony systems be married with the flexibility and heterogeneous traffic of data communications. Second, pervasive (or ubiquitous) computing with sensors and actuators embedded everywhere in the physical environment we live in must also operate on a timely basis. The wide spectrum of timing constraints that real-time systems need to satisfy often requires that resources must be explicitly managed and allocated. Those who are still skeptical of the need to do explicit resource management in a “plentiful resource environment” should run one or more of the following practical tests: