A distributed scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous real-time systems

Abstract

Much of the previous work on load balancing and scheduling in distributed environments was concerned with homogeneous systems and homogeneous loads. Several of the results indicated that random policies are as effective as other more complex load allocation policies. The effects of heterogeneity on scheduling algorithms for hard real time systems is examined. A distributed scheduler specifically to handle heterogeneities in both nodes and node traffic is proposed. The performance of the algorithm is measured in terms of the percentage of jobs discarded. While a random task allocation is very sensitive to heterogeneities, the algorithm is shown to be robust to such non-uniformities in system components and load.