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)