Reducing power consumption of non-preemptive real-time systems

With introduction of dynamic voltage scaling techniques, promising results have been obtained for minimizing overall power consumptions of the real-time systems by exploiting the hardware characteristics of latest processors. Traditionally, preemptive systems have been investigated in depth and interesting results are established accordingly. The non-preemptive counterpart, though equally important, has received very little attention. Due to its simple implementation and lesser number of context switching, non-preemptive systems offer even more opportunities to be exploited for reducing power consumption of the system. In this paper, we establish mathematical foundations for determining the system speed appropriate to non-preemptive nature of tasks such that the timing constraints remain intact and overall power consumption is reduced. We compare our results with closely related techniques, and our analysis shows that the reduction in power consumptions is significant with proposed technique.