Energy Efficient Scheduling for Real-Time Embedded Systems with QoS Guarantee

While the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) techniques are efficient in reducing the dynamic energy consumption for the processor, varying voltage alone becomes less effective for the overall energy reduction as the static power is growing rapidly. On the other hand, Quality of Service (QoS) is also a primary concern in the development of today's pervasive computing systems. In this paper, we propose a dynamic approach to minimize the overall energy consumption for soft real-time systems while ensuring the QoS-guarantee. The QoS requirements are deterministically quantified with the window-constraints, which require that at least m out of each non-overlapped window of k consecutive jobs of a task meet their deadlines. Necessary and sufficient conditions for checking the feasibility of task sets with arbitrary service times and periods are developed to ensure that the window-constraints can be guaranteed in the worst case. And efficient scheduling techniques based on pattern variation and dynamic slack reclaiming extensions are proposed to combine the task procrastination and dynamic slowdown to minimize the energy consumption. In contrast to the previous leakage-aware slack reclaiming work which never scales the job speed below the critical speed, we will show that it can be more energy efficient to reclaim the slack with speed lower than the critical speed when necessary. Through extensive simulations, our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed techniques significantly outperformed the previous research in both overall and idle energy reduction.