A Method for Dynamic Software Updating in Real-Time Systems

To cope with demands for new and extended functionality, software systems must be updated regularly. This usually requires providing some new codes, merging these codes into the archaic program, and restarting the updated application. This process results in disrupting programs that may be unacceptable, especially in real-time environments which have strict timing constraints. Even, an update which doesnpsilat require the system to stop but causes a deadline to be missed is not a good one in real-time systems. In this paper, we propose a new approach to dynamically update a real-time application without having to disrupt the program. Our method can be applied to update real-time applications in which the rate-monotonic scheduling algorithm is used, while preserving the original deadline guarantees.