Implementing a General Real-Time Scheduling Framework in the RED-Linux Real-Time Kernel

Many scheduling paradigms have been studied for real-time applications and real-time communication network. Among them, the most commonly used paradigms include priority-driven, time-driven and share-driven paradigms. In this paper, we present a general scheduling framework which is designed to integrate these paradigms in one frame-work. The framework is implemented in our real-time extension of the Linux kernel, RED-Linux. Two scheduler components are used in the framework: Allocator and Dispatcher. For each job, the framework identifies four scheduling attributes: priority, start_time, finish_time and budget. We show that the framework can be used to efficiently implement many well-known scheduling algorithms. We also measure and analyze the performance of the frame-work implemented in RED-Linux.