A means of scheduling the time allocated to periodic hard-deadline real-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].