An Improved Speedup Factor for Sporadic Tasks with Constrained Deadlines Under Dynamic Priority Scheduling

Schedulability is a fundamental problem in real-time scheduling, but it has to be approximated due to the intrinsic computational hardness. As the most popular algorithm for deciding schedulability on multiprocess platforms, the speedup factor of partitioned-EDF is challenging to analyze and is far from being determined. Partitioned-EDF was first proposed in 2005 by Barush and Fisher [1], and was shown to have a speedup factor at most 3-1/m, meaning that if the input of sporadic tasks is feasible on m processors with speed one, partitioned-EDF will always succeed on m processors with speed 3-1/m. In 2011, this upper bound was improved to 2.6322-1/m by Chen and Chakraborty [2], and no more improvements have appeared ever since then. In this paper, we develop a novel method to discretize and regularize sporadic tasks, which enables us to improve, in the case of constrained deadlines, the speedup factor of partitioned-EDF to 2.5556-1/m, very close to the asymptotic lower bound 2.5 in [2].