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A Comparison of Real-Time Task Scheduling Methods in Spacecraft Simulation

Authors

Mehmet Emin Gulluoglu and Mehmet Resit Tolun, Baskent University, Turkey

Abstract

Today, embedded real-time applications play an important role in modern life. Satellites are also robust embedded real-time applications. A satellite project can cost over three-hundred million dollars. As many satellite manufacturers validate their satellites before launching, satellite simulators play the most valuable role in validation infrastructures. Specifically, satellite flight software validation has become more important. In this paper, we focused on the round robin (RR), rate monotonic (RM), and event driven (ED) real-time scheduling task methods with respect to their CPU usage performance for satellite simulator infrastructures. The tasks are evaluated and tested by real-time executive for multiprocessor systems (RTEMS). Those scheduling tasks are used in polling mode in the simulation setup. In this study, we compared three task scheduler methods for attitude orbit control system tasks and MIL-STD 1553 bus data distribution controller tasks in a spacecraft simulator environment. The results were close and the values were not segregated, thus, we chose RR and ED, because RR was easy to implement and ED allowed for full control of the tasks.

Keywords

Real-time embedded systems, Real-time operating system, Rate monotonic task, Round robin task, Event driven task handling, and Satellite simulations

Full Text  Volume 8, Number 9