A means of scheduling the time allocated to periodic hard-deadlinereal-timeUSers 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)