Allocation and Scheduling of Strictly Periodic Tasks in Multi-Core Real-Time Systems

Integrated modular design has been widely adopted as an approach to facilitating the development process of large-scale real-time systems. Although this approach can achieve enhanced design reuse and reduced time consumption, it results in a complex task allocation and scheduling problem. All tasks should be integrated into a shared platform according to a proper schedule, such that their deadlines will be met even under the worst case situations. In this paper, we study the allocation and scheduling problem of strictly periodic tasks in multi-core real-time systems. We first propose a necessary and sufficient condition to determine whether a new task is schedulable on a processor without changing the start times of the existing tasks. Then, based on the condition derived previously, we present a task assignment algorithm, which not only provides valid start times and processor allocations for all tasks, but also obtains the minimum number of processors required by the system. Finally, simulation experiments with randomly generated task sets are conducted to show the high efficiency and reliability of the proposed approach.