An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Scheduling Approach with Energy Minimization for Hard Real-Time Embedded Systems

In this paper, we focus on two major problems in hard real-time embedded systems fault tolerance and energy minimization. Fault tolerance is achieved via both checkpointing technique and active replication strategy to tolerate multiple transient faults, whereas energy minimization is achieved by adapting Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique. First, we introduce an original fault-tolerance approach for hard real-time systems on multiprocessor platforms. Based on this approach, we then propose DVFS_FTS algorithm for energy-efficient fault-tolerant scheduling of precedence-constrained applications. DVFS_FTS is based on a list scheduling heuristics, it satisfies real-time constraints and minimizes energy consumption even in the presence of faults by exploring the multiprocessor architecture. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can save a significant amount of energy while preserving the required fault-tolerance of the system and outperforms other related approaches in energy savings.