Improved conditions for bounded tardiness under EPDF Pfair multiprocessor scheduling

The earliest-pseudo-deadline-first (EPDF) Pfair algorithm is more efficient than other known Pfair scheduling algorithms, but is not optimal for scheduling recurrent real-time task systems on more than two identical processors. Although not optimal, EPDF may be preferable for real-time systems instantiated on less-powerful platforms, those with soft timing constraints, or those whose task composition can change at run-time. In prior work, Srinivasan and Anderson established a sufficient per-task utilization restriction for ensuring a tardiness of at most q quanta, where q ≥ 1, under EPDF. They also conjectured that under this algorithm, a tardiness bound of one quantum applies to task systems that are not subject to any restriction other than the obvious restrictions, namely, that the total system utilization not exceed the available processing capacity and per-task utilizations not exceed 1.0. In this paper, we present counterexamples that show that their conjecture is false and present sufficient per-task utilization restrictions that are more liberal than theirs. For ensuring a tardiness bound of one quantum, our restriction presents an improvement of 50% over the previous one. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.