In real-time systems, in addition to the functional correctness recurrent
tasks must fulfill timing constraints to ensure the correct behavior of the
system. Partitioned scheduling is widely used in real-time systems, i.e., the
tasks are statically assigned onto processors while ensuring that all timing
constraints are met. The decision version of the problem, which is to check
whether the deadline constraints of tasks can be satisfied on a given number of
identical processors, has been known NP-complete in the strong sense.
Several studies on this problem are based on approximations involving resource
augmentation, i.e., speeding up individual processors. This paper studies
another type of resource augmentation by allocating additional processors, a
topic that has not been explored until recently. We provide polynomial-time
algorithms and analysis, in which the approximation factors are dependent upon
the input instances. Specifically, the factors are related to the maximum ratio
of the period to the relative deadline of a task in the given task set. We also
show that these algorithms unfortunately cannot achieve a constant
approximation factor for general cases. Furthermore, we prove that the problem
does not admit any asymptotic polynomial-time approximation scheme (APTAS)
unless P=NP when the task set has constrained deadlines, i.e.,
the relative deadline of a task is no more than the period of the task.Comment: Accepted and to appear in ISAAC 2018, Yi-Lan, Taiwa