Hardware support for distributed real-time operating systems

This paper presents a hardware architecture for supporting distributed realtime operating systems. It proposes the use of dedicated hardware units for running task scheduling and communication, in order to alleviate the load of the processor responsible for running the application tasks. These hardware units also compute the execution time of application tasks and other statistics that can be taken into account by more elaborated scheduling algorithms. The proposal enhances the overall system predictability. Since the proposal is based on low-cost microcontrollers, it represents a cost-effective proposal for developing low-cost distributed real-rime systems.