Abstract: An increasing trend in real-time systems is to integrate multiple functionalities of different levels of criticality, or importance, on the same platform, which leads the research of mixed criticality systems. In the current mixed criticality scheduling research, worst-case execution times or periods of high critical-level tasks are critical parameters, which are different between in high-critical mode and low-critical mode. Deadline is also an important time-parameter, especially in hard real-time systems, whereas how to schedule mixed criticality tasks using deadline as the critical parameter is still lack of discussion. This paper considers the mixed criticality scheduling in which deadlines of tasks are the critical parameter on a uniprocessor platform. Towards satisfying schedulability of high-criticality tasks in both modes, we use response time analysis to get timing-demand of fixed priority tasks and propose the raising critical-level in advance (RCLA) scheduling algorithm. RCLA gets high-critical tasks with lower priority to preempt low-critical tasks with higher priority earlier and limitedly. As well as meeting the deadlines of high criticality tasks in high-criticality mode and low-criticality mode, RCLA can schedule mixed criticality tasks as many as possible. Simulation results illustrate the benefits of this scheme.

Key words: mixed criticality, real-time scheduling, deadline, critical parameter, response time