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Weakly Hard Real-Time Systems

Published: 01 April 2001 Publication History

Abstract

In a hard real-time system, it is assumed that no deadline is missed, whereas, in a soft or firm real-time system, deadlines can be missed, although this usually happens in a nonpredictable way. However, most hard real-time systems could miss some deadlines provided that it happens in a known and predictable way. Also, adding predictability on the pattern of missed deadlines for soft and firm real-time systems is desirable, for instance, to guarantee levels of quality of service. We introduce the concept of weakly hard real-time systems to model real-time systems that can tolerate a clearly specified degree of missed deadlines. For this purpose, we define four temporal constraints based on determining a maximum number of deadlines that can be missed during a window of time (a given number of invocations). This paper provides the theoretical analysis of the properties and relationships of these constraints. It also shows the exact conditions under which a constraint is harder to satisfy than another constraint. Finally, results on fixed priority scheduling and response-time schedulability tests for a wide range of process models are presented.

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cover image IEEE Transactions on Computers
IEEE Transactions on Computers  Volume 50, Issue 4
April 2001
95 pages
ISSN:0018-9340
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IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2001

Author Tags

  1. Real-time systems
  2. schedulability analysis
  3. scheduling algorithms
  4. specification
  5. temporal constraints
  6. transient overload.

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