Guaranteeing Optional Task Completions on (m,k)-Firm Real-Time Systems

Previous preemptive real-time (m,k)-firm schedulers all try a best effort policy to dispatch k-m executions when m out of k consecutive task executions have met their deadlines. These additional executions can only bring value to the system if no firm deadline is missed. In this paper we present a framework whereby an on-line feasibility test is carried out on these k-m executions before dispatching them. With our scheme, all dispatched tasks are guaranteed to meet their deadlines.