First steps towards an IEEE 802.1AS clock for EDF scheduling in distributed real-time systems

Abstract

The EDF (Earliest Deadline First) scheduling policy can take advantage of the existence of a synchronization clock mechanism to reach higher utilizations in distributed real-time systems, as indicated by theoretical research. In this work, we give the first steps to enable the usage of EDF and a global clock in a distributed system. To this end, our proposal relies on Linux to provide the global clock and on a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) to provide the global EDF policy. The objective is the evaluation of global EDF to verify to what extent the theoretical results are met.