Fault-tolerant scheduling in homogeneous real-time systems

Abstract

Real-time systems are one of the most important applications of computers, both in commercial terms and in terms of social impact. Increasingly, real-time computers are used to control life-critical applications and need to meet stringent reliability conditions. Since the reliability of a real-time system is related to the probability of meeting its hard deadlines, these reliability requirements translate to the need to meet critical task deadlines with a very high probability. We survey the problem of how to schedule tasks in such a way that deadlines continue to be met despite processor (permanent or transient) or software failure.