A Combined Approach to Improve the Response Time of Soft Aperiodic Tasks

In a real-time system with both hard deadline periodic tasks and soft deadline aperiodic tasks, hard deadline tasks must be guaranteed to meet their deadlines and soft deadline tasks are serviced in a best-effort manner. To schedule soft deadline aperiodic tasks in dynamic priority systems, one can assign a virtual deadline like the TBS algorithm or use capacity servers like the DPE algorithm. Both approaches have their own advantages, and we cannot say which one is better in terms of response time. In some cases, TBS provides shorter response time than DPE server. In other cases, the reverse may happen. In this paper, we propose a combined approach to improve the response time of soft deadline aperiodic tasks. The proposed method combines the deadline assignment and the capacity server approach. When there is enough capacity available for aperiodic tasks, the aperiodic tasks are served by capacity servers. Otherwise, our method assigns a deadline and schedule aperiodic task together with periodic tasks by EDF algorithm. In the worst case, the proposed method provides response time no later than TBS. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the responsiveness of soft deadline aperiodic tasks.