Energy-Aware Scheduling for Sensor Node Platforms

This paper primarily presents a technique to integrate energy-aware real-time scheduling into battery-powered sensor node platforms. The proposed scheduling technique attempts to achieve energy savings while meeting timing requirements of real-time tasks as well as improving the response time of non-real-time tasks. The proposed energy-aware real-time scheduling technique is addressed from two perspectives: a dynamic voltage scaling (DVS)-based scheduling approach and a combined real-time and non-real-time scheduling approach. From the perspective of DVS-based scheduling approach, it reduces the processor frequency and still ensures that no tasks miss their timing constraints. From the perspective of a combined real-time and non-real-time scheduling scheme, tasks are allowed to have timing constraints. Consequently, real-time tasks need to be processed in a timely fashion and delivered to meet their timing constraints, and non-real-time tasks need to be quickly processed to deliver a fast response. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed scheduling technique yields efficient performance in terms of low energy consumption and a fast average response time for non-real-time tasks, whilst meeting the timing constraints of real-time tasks.