Scope of the Conference
The IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) is the premier conference in the field of real-time systems, and is a venue for researchers and practitioners to showcase innovations covering all aspects of real-time systems, including theory, design, analysis, implementation, evaluation, and experience. RTSS’21, celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the event, continues the trend of making RTSS an expansive and inclusive event, striving to embrace new and emerging areas of real-time systems research.
RTSS’21 welcomes submissions of high-quality, original research papers related to both real-time system theory and practice. Submissions can go to either the real-time system track (Track 1) or the design and application track (Track 2) which covers Cyber-Physical Systems, HW-SW integration and system-level design, and Internet of Things (IoT). To be in scope, ALL submissions must address some form of real-time requirements such as deadlines, response times or delays/latency. All accepted papers will appear in the main program and proceedings.
RTSS especially welcomes new and emerging topics provided that they address some aspects of real-time requirements as stated above. Such topics may include machine learning techniques for design and analysis of real-time systems, system design approaches for achieving real-time machine learning, resource management in autonomous systems, system-level solutions for real-time applications exploiting domain-specific accelerators, etc.
Note the above list of topics is intended only as a rough guide and should not be understood as an exclusive list. Papers breaking new ground, departing from established subfields, or challenging the status quo are most welcome and are encouraged.
Empirical survey-based research focused on the real-time systems field is welcomed: This type of research uses surveys, questionnaires, interviews, or other empirical techniques to obtain information about the past / current / future state of play in the research, design, development, verification, validation, and deployment of real-time systems. Such papers should focus on aspects that are relevant to the real-time behaviour of systems. (Note literature surveys that classify, review, and summarize existing research papers are not considered empirical research and are not in scope of the conference).
All accepted papers will appear in the main program and proceedings. A selection of papers will receive recognition as outstanding papers, and will be highlighted as such in the proceedings. Best paper and best student paper awards will be presented at the conference, along with an award for the best presentation. (Note that submissions are eligible for the best student paper award provided that the first author is a student as of the submission deadline).
Track 1: Real-Time System Track
The objective of this track is to promote cutting-edge research in real-time systems, especially new and emerging topics. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following: operating systems, networks, middleware, compilers, tools, scheduling, QoS support, resource management, testing and debugging, design and verification, modeling, WCET analysis, performance analysis, fault tolerance, security, and system experimentation and deployment experiences.
Track 2: Design and Application Track
This track aims to highlight the newest research achievements in designs, implementations and applications that must attend to some aspects of real-time requirements. Continuing with the success in previous years, the track will particularly focus on four specialized areas:
Cyber-Physical Systems
CPS applications (such as transportation, healthcare, industrial control, etc.) interact with the physical worlds. Hence, they do possess real-time requirements. Papers are welcomed that identify scientific foundations and technologies that advance the state-of-the-art for CPS. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) foundations of CPS, design methods, simulation/emulation for CPS, tools chains, CPS architectures, security and privacy, hardware/software compositions that include physical components, performance analysis, robustness and safety, and analysis techniques and tools especially those with multiple temporal and spatial scales.
HW-SW Integration and System–Level Design
This area focuses on design methodologies and tools for hardware/software integration and co-design of modern embedded systems for real-time applications. Topics include (but are not limited to) architecture description languages and tools, hardware architectures, design space exploration, synthesis and optimization. Of special interest are SoC design for real-time applications, special-purpose functional units, specialized memory structures, multi-core chips and communication aspects, FPGA simulation and prototyping, software simulation and compilation for novel architectures and applications, as well as power, thermal, timing and predictability analyses.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Grand challenges in IoT include extremely constrained resources (energy supply, storage and computational power) in IoT devices, unprecedented scalability requirements as well as uncertain dynamics in their operating environments. Submissions are welcomed that build on solid theoretical foundations, present empirical development, and experimental evaluations for empowering IoT applications. Of special interest is research addressing aspects of scalability, interoperability, uncertainty, reliability, security, power management, energy scavenging, architectures, operating systems, middleware and programming abstractions, protocols, modelling, analysis and performance evaluation.
Paper Submissions
Submitted papers must describe original work not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere. All submitted papers must comply with the double-blind submission requirements. The main body of each submitted paper is limited to 11 pages of technical content with additional pages permitted for the bibliography and acknowledgments only. Submissions must be formatted according to IEEE conference paper guidelines.
To submit a paper please visit the Submission page.
Journal Special Issue
The RTSS 2021 TPC co-chairs together with Daniel Mosse are Guest Editors of a special issue on Real-Time Systems scheduled to appear on IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC) in July 2022. More information can be found on the special issue webpage. All authors are welcome to submit their manuscripts to this special issue. Please note that, as usual, papers that extend conference publications (RTSS 2021 or others) must contain new materials (see special issue webpage for more information). Finally, all submissions will undergo a new reviewing process as per IEEE TC’s policy.