Guest editorial—RTNS 2010
This issue of the journal Real-Time Systems contains extended versions of a selection of four papers from among those that were presented at the 18th International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems (RTNS-2010), which was held in Toulouse on November 4 and 5, 2010. The scope of the conference covered all aspects of real-time systems and networks. A selection of the papers presented at the conference were invited to submit extended versions for this journal special issue. These papers had all been rated very favorably during the conference review process, and were selected based on their quality, relevance and significance. The extended versions were subject to an additional rigorous review process in accordance with the standards and expectations of this journal, with the authors required to satisfactorily address all concerns expressed by the reviewers before the papers were accepted for publication in this issue. The paper entitled “Partitioned EDF Scheduling for Multiprocessors using a C = D Task Splitting Scheme” is written by Alan Burns, Robert Davis, Pengyu Wang and Fengxiang Zhang. It introduces an EDF-based task-splitting scheme for scheduling multiprocessor systems. One of the advantages of this scheme is that no special run-time mechanisms are required; furthermore, run-time overheads are kept to a minimum. Evaluation is provided via a comparison with a fully partitioned scheme and by determining the theoretical maximum processor utilisation.