This valuable reference provides a comprehensive treatment of the technology known as RMA (rate-monotonic analysis) method. It also covers the tremendous recent advances in real-time operating systems and communications networks—emphasizing research results that have been adopted in state-of-the-art systems. Describing how and discussing why, this book uses insightful illustrative examples to convey technology transition in the last ten years. Coverage includes commonly used approaches to hard real-time scheduling, clock-driven scheduling, scheduling aperiodic and sporadic jobs in priority-driven systems, resources and resource access control, real-time communications, and operating systems. For systems architects, designers, chief scientists and technologists, and systems analysts.