Improving the performance of periodic real-time processes: a graph theoretical approach

In this paper the performance gain obtained by combining parallel periodic real-time processes is elaborated. In certain single-core mono-processor configurations, for example embedded control systems in robotics comprising many short processes, process context switches may consume a considerable amount of the available processing power. For this reason it can be advantageous to combine processes, to reduce the number of context switches and thereby increase the performance of the application. As we consider robotic applications only, often consisting of processes with identical periods, release times and deadlines, we restrict these configurations to periodic real-time processes executing on a single-core mono-processor. By graph theoretical concepts and means, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions so that the number of context switches can be reduced by combining synchronising processes.