Assessment of Real time Scheduling Strategies on RTOS

This paper presents a comparative study of well-known real time schedulers, Earliest Deadline First (EDF) and the Rate Monotonic (RM) schedulers with the objective to evaluate their performance and suitability for real-time embedded applications on FreeRTOS. Synthetic tasks were developed to simulate real-world scenarios. Performance metrics, including average wait time, number of context switches, and CPU utilization, are then employed to assess the effectiveness of the schedulers. Results demonstrate that EDF outperforms RM in terms of deadline miss ratio, particularly under high system load. EDF also tends to minimize average wait time; however, it may result in a higher number of context switches. In contrast, RM exhibits higher average wait time but generally has fewer context switches. It is noteworthy that the difference between EDF and RM becomes less significant for periodic tasks with deadlines equal to their period, thereby increasing the performance dependability on the total number of tasks that are to be scheduled. The findings aim to assist system designers in making informed decisions when selecting a suitable scheduling algorithm for their real-time applications.