Several approaches to extend the original Android implementation with real-time capabilities were presented in the last
few years. Most of the research was limited to fundamental issues like real-time scheduling and non-blocking memory management. This paper demonstrates the weak predictability
of Android’s intra- and inter-process communication and presents a concept to improve its soft real-time capability.
The proposed approach introduces a priority-based broadcast handling, instead of the original first in – first out processing.
Additionally, we reduce the size of responsible critical sections in order to improve the preemptibility and assure predictable
delays for applications with real-time requirements. Our empirical evaluation highlights the improvements in
comparison to the original Android implementation without loss of the performance for both global and local broadcast systems. Furthermore, the compatibility to already existing
components and applications is preserved.