Holistic schedulability analysis for distributed hard real-time systems

This paper extends the current analysis associated with static priority pre-emptive based scheduling to address the wider problem of analysing schedulability of a distributed hard real-time system; in particular it derives analysis for a distributed system where tasks with arbitrary deadlines communicate by message passing and shared data areas. A simple TDMA protocol is assumed, and analysis developed to bound not only the communications delays, but also the delays and overheads incurred when messages are processed by the protocol stack at the destination processor. The paper illustrates how a window-based analysis technique can be used to find the worst-case response times of a distributed task set. An extended example illustrating the application of the analysis is presented.