Low power software techniques for embedded systems running real time operating systems

Power consumption is an important constraint in embedded systems running real time operating systems (RTOS). This study proposes an evaluation of significance of the joint effect of possible factors in the power consumption of RTOS running on small and medium scale embedded systems. Design of experiments techniques (DOE) were used to identify the impact in the power consumption of the system. A case of study is presented with optimizations oriented to dynamic frequency scaling and memory management were applied to FreeRTOS. Experiments allowed us to find relationships between the type of architecture, the workload, and OS optimizations in power reduction.