Design and Analysis for Dual Priority Scheduling

Abstract

This paper considers Dual Priority (DP) scheduling of constrained deadline sporadic tasks on uniprocessor. The initial fixed priority of each job of a task is promoted to a higher priority (called, promoted priority) after a fixed time interval (called, promotion point) relative to the release time of that job. DP scheduling alters the default preemptive behavior of traditional fixed priority (FP) scheduling to efficiently utilize the processor as close as possible to that of the optimal earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduler. In this paper, we address some of the main challenges of DP scheduling including derivation of a sufficient schedulability test, determination of promotion point of each task1. To the best of our knowledge, this test is the first schedulability test for DP scheduling applicable to constrained deadline sporadic tasks. The test is applicable for any given promotion points of the tasks and has pseudo-polynomial time complexity. We also propose two different heuristics to assign the promotion points, and experimental results show that the proposed test achieves performance very close to that of EDF scheduling.