Scheduling real-time multi-task applications in an open system

This paper focuses on the problem of providing isolation and real-time execution in scheduling multi-thread applications on a single processor. The proposed scheduling algorithm can be applied in a wide range of different situations, such as in a multimedia real-time systems, where applications may require a guaranteed level of Quality of Service, or in a network link, where different flows of packets may require a certain level of service. This algorithm does not require the exact knowledge of the service times and interarrival times of the tasks: hence, it is especially suited for soft real-time and multimedia environments.