Published on Jun 05, 2023
The industrial and military sectors require varying levels of 'real-time' computer response depending on the specific nature of each task to be performed. Consequently, three different definitions of 'real-time' can be illustrated by a battlefield scenario where soldiers in the field provide 'real-time' data which is ultimately sent to the commander's 'real-time' tactical display which provides information used to determine that a missile (using a 'real-time' computer system) should be launched.
The 'real-time' data from the troops can be compared to the now familiar 'real-time stock quote', providing information that was current within the last few seconds or perhaps minutes. This can be referred to as 'human real-time' since short delays in the tactical data provided from the field are obscured by the much longer human delays associated with sorting and correlation. The video display observed by the commander illustrates 'soft real-time', where the loss of an occasional frame will not cause any perceived video degradation, provided that the average case performance remains acceptable.
Although techniques such as interpolation can be used to compensate for missing frames, the system remains a soft-real time system because the actual data was missed, and the interpolated frame represents derived, rather than actual data.'Hard real-time' is illustrated by the control system of a high-speed missile because it relies on guaranteed and repeatable system responses of thousandths or millionths of a second. Since these control deadlines can never be missed, a hard real-time system cannot use average case performance to compensate for worst-case performance. Thus, hard real-time systems are required for the most technically challenging tasks. Since an embedded system often performs only a single task, the differences between soft and hard real-time for these applications are not as critical as one would think.
