Earliest deadline first (EDF) is a widely-used online algorithm for scheduling jobs with deadlines in real-time systems. Yet, existing results on the performance guarantee of EDF are limited to underloaded systems [6,12,14]. This paper initiates the study of EDF for overloaded systems, attaining similar performance guarantees as in the underloaded setting. Specifically, we show that EDF with a simple form of admission control is optimal for scheduling on both uniprocessor and multiprocessors when moderately faster processors are available (our analysis actually admits a tradeoff between speed and extra processors). This is the first result attaining optimality under overload. Another contribution of this paper is an improved analysis of the competitiveness for weighted deadline scheduling.published_or_final_versio
