Published Paper Details:

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two widely used real-time scheduling algorithms--Earliest Deadline First (EDF) and Rate Monotonic (RM)--with the objective of evaluating their performance and suitability for real-time embedded applications on FreeRTOS. To simulate realistic execution scenarios, synthetic task sets were generated. The performance of each scheduler was assessed based on key metrics such as average waiting time, number of context switches, and CPU utilization. The results indicate that EDF consistently outperforms RM in terms of meeting deadlines, especially under high system loads. EDF also tends to reduce average waiting time; however, it incurs a higher number of context switches. In contrast, RM scheduling leads to increased average wait times but generally results in fewer context switches, which can be advantageous for power-sensitive or resource-constrained systems. Interestingly, for periodic tasks where deadlines are equal to their periods, the performance gap between EDF and RM narrows. In such cases, the efficiency of the scheduling strategy becomes more dependent on the total number of tasks being managed. Overall, the study provides valuable insights to embedded system designers, enabling them to make more informed decisions when selecting the appropriate scheduling strategy based on application-specific requirements.