Energy-Efficient Scheduling for Embedded Real-Time Systems Using Threshold Work-Demand Analysis

In this paper, we study the problem of reducing the energy consumption for hard real-time systems scheduled according to either fixed-priority (FP) or earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheme. To balance the static and dynamic energy consumptions, the concept of critical speed was proposed in previous research. Moreover, when combined with the processor idle/shutdown state, the critical speed was widely used as the lower bound for voltage scaling in literature. In this paper, we show that this strategy might not always be more energy efficient than the traditional DVS strategy and there exists a dynamic tradeoff between these two strategies depending on the job's work-demand to be finished within certain intervals. To effectively address this issue, we propose a unified approach that combines these two strategies to achieve better overall energy saving performance. Our approach determines the energy-efficient speeds for real-time jobs in their corresponding feasible intervals based on the threshold work-demand analysis. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed techniques significantly outperform previous approaches in the overall energy saving performance.