A multiprocessor real-time process scheduling method

Abstract

Multimedia systems like video-on-demand systems require a good scheduling method to improve their services because of their real-time requirements. If such systems consist of multiple processors, then the scheduling problem becomes much important. Scheduling is an important problem for both computer science and operation research. It is proved that the complexity for scheduling problems is NP-complete and sometimes NP-hard depending on the constraints of the problems, implying the difficulties for finding a good scheduling approach. We propose a method for multiprocessor real-time scheduling algorithm applicable for both computer science and operation research. Our method is general enough to solve different scheduling problems such as wafer lot dispatching and scheduling for behaviors of a robot soccer player. There are scheduling problems exist in multimedia systems with real-time constraints, although the scheduling problems for multimedia systems have some unique characteristics differ from process scheduling, we believe the generality nature of our method facilitates the possibility of our scheduling method to be helpful for multimedia systems to solve scheduling problems after some minor modifications.