  This paper presents a second-order heavy traffic analysis of a single server
queue that processes customers having deadlines using the
earliest-deadline-first scheduling policy. For such systems, referred to as
real-time queueing systems, performance is measured by the fraction of
customers who meet their deadline, rather than more traditional performance
measures, such as customer delay, queue length or server utilization. To model
such systems, one must keep track of customer lead times (the time remaining
until a customer deadline elapses) or equivalent information. This paper
reviews the earlier heavy traffic analysis of such systems that provided
approximations to the system's behavior. The main result of this paper is the
development of a second-order analysis that gives the accuracy of the
approximations and the rate of convergence of the sequence of real-time
queueing systems to its heavy traffic limit.
