Guest editorial: real-time networks and systems

This section of Real-Time Systems provides extended journal versions of the outstanding work presented at the 24th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS 2016), held at Université de Bretagne Occidentale (November 2016, in Brest, France). The purpose of RTNS is to provide a venue for sharing new ideas, experiences and information among academic researchers, developers and service providers in the field of real-time systems and networks. The 24th edition of the conference continued the established series with a rich program of 34 papers (out of 75 submissions), with a diversity of topics, such as transactions and distributed systems, network analysis, synchronous dataflow graphs, scheduling and schedulability, periodic systems and control, network optimization, many-core and networks-on-chip, multicore scheduling, timing analysis, parallelism, a clear demonstration of the broad scope of real-time systems and networks research. The special issue consists of four papers that cover various areas, from high level system design and optimization to low level timing analysis of computer systems and networks, which have undergone a rigorous peer-review process according to the journal’s high standards.