An engineering approach to decomposing end-to-end delays on a distributed real-time system

We propose an adequate engineering technique for decomposing end-to-end delays in distributed real time systems. Our technique greatly simplifies the real time system design process by turning a global distributed scheduling problem into a set of single processor scheduling problems with local deadlines. The deadline decomposition is done using critical scaling factor (J. Lehoczky et al., 1989) as a schedulability metric. As the problem is extremely hard in general, we develop an approximate technique using a simple linear response time model to generate a quick initial solution. We then go on to show how the initial solution helps us identify the bottlenecks, and then use that knowledge to iteratively fine tune the initial solution. The end result is a practical engineering technique to decomposing end-to-end deadlines.