A means of scheduling the time allocated to periodic hard-deadlinereal-time users of a resource.The users are assigned priorities such that a shorter fixed period between deadlines is associated with a higher priority.Rate monotonic scheduling provides a low-overhead, reasonably resource-efficient means of guaranteeing that all users will meet their deadlines provided that certain analytical equations are satisfied during the system design.It avoids the design complexity of time-line scheduling and the overhead of dynamic approaches such as {earliest-deadline scheduling}.[D. R. Wilcox, Naval Ocean Systems Center Technical Report 1310, August 1989, "Periodic Phase Adjustment Distributed Clock Synchronization in the Hard Realtime Environment", p. 9].(1996-03-23)