Dynamic real-time scheduling of firm periodic tasks with hard and soft aperiodic tasks

In this paper, we address the problem of the dynamic scheduling of skippable periodic task sets (i.e., period tasks allowing occasional skips of instances), together with aperiodic tasks. Scheduling of tasks is handled thanks to the merging of two existing approaches: the Skip-Over task model and the EDL (Earliest Deadline as Late as possible) aperiodic task server. The objective is to provide two on-line scheduling algorithms, namely EDL-RTO and EDL-BWP, in order to minimize the average response time of soft aperiodic requests, while ensuring that the QoS (Quality of Service) of periodic tasks will never be less than a specified bound. We also extend our results to the acceptance of sporadic tasks (i.e., aperiodic tasks with deadlines). We show that these novel scheduling algorithms have better performance compared to related algorithms regarding aperiodic response time and acceptance ratio.