Guest editorial: multiprocessor scheduling

Abstract

Real-time multiprocessor systems have an increasing importance in current technology and are the source of innovations to build new applications that require high levels of computations (in for example, industrial processes, transportation, telecommunications, multimedia and medical equipment). In the context of real-time systems, it is not sufficient to prove the correctness of applications in term of results but also that those results are delivered in time. The following papers are extended, peer-reviewed, journal-versions of papers focusing on multiprocessor systems that have been selected by the conference program committee of the 19th Real-Time and Network Systems Conference (RTNS’2011) for their high quality. RTNS’2011 was held in Nantes, France in September 2011. The annual RTNS conference is mainly focused on the following topics: realtime system design and analysis; infrastructure and hardware for real-time systems; and real-time applications in the automotive, avionics, telecommunications, process control and the multimedia industries. Each paper was extended to add significant extra material and the resulting papers were re-reviewed and subject to the usual editorial process. The result is a special issue that we hope will be of interest to the real-time community. In recent years, multiprocessor architectures have become a firm favorite with the real-time community, and multicore processors are found in products ranging from small portable cell phones to large computer servers. New scheduling approaches