Deadline Assignment in a Distributed Soft Real-Time System

Abstract

In a distributed environment, tasks often have processing demands on multiple different sites. A distributed task is usually divided up into several subtasks, each one to be executed at some site in order. In a real-time system, an overall deadline is usually specified by an application designer indicating when a distributed task is to be finished. However, the problem of how a global deadline is automatically translated to the deadline of each individual subtask has not been well studied. This paper examines (through simulations) four strategies for subtask deadline assignment in a distributed soft real-time environment. Keywords: soft real-time, distributed systems, deadline assignment, scheduling.