Diverse Soft Real-Time Processing in an Integrated System

The simple notion of soft real-time processing has fractured into a spectrum of diverse soft real-time types with a variety of different resource and time constraints. Schedulers have been developed for each of these types, but these are essentially point solutions in the space of soft real-time and no detailed unified definition of soft real-time has previously been provided that includes all types of soft realtime processing. We present a complete real-time taxonomy covering the spectrum of processes from best-effort to hard real-time. The taxonomy divides processes into nine classes based on their resource and timeliness requirements and includes four soft real-time classes, each of which captures a group of soft real-time applications with similar characteristics. We exploit the different features of each of the soft real-time classes to integrate all of them into a single scheduler together with hard real-time and best-effort processes and present results demonstrating their performance