Scheduling in distributed soft real-time systems with autonomous components
Benjamin Chi-Ming Kao · 1996
Traditional real-time systems are usually used by very specific, mission-critical applications, such as a nuclear reactor monitor. For these applications task deadlines must not be missed. However, with the advances of computer and communication technology, and as computers become a commonplace utility, more applications are requiring a casual use of real-time technology. Task deadlines in these applications are soft in the sense that missing a deadline occasionally is, although undesirable, not a disaster. Example soft real-time applications include 800-number translation, cellular telecommunication, financial databases, patient-monitoring systems and so on. In these applications, deadlines are used as a tool to express performance goals. For example, a buy-sell action triggered by a stock-price update in a financial database system should be implemented within a specified period of time due to the volatility of the market. To conserve resources, soft real-time systems are usually not...