The 1st International Workshop on Embedded System Software Development and Quality Assurance
(WESQA 2010), in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC '10),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (2010)

Leveraging Performance and Power Savings for Embedded Systems
Using Multiple Target Deadlines 1

Edward Y. Y. Kan 2 , W.K. Chan 3 , and T.H. Tse 2

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | technical report TR-2010-05]

 ABSTRACT

Tasks running on embedded systems are often associated with deadlines. While it is important to complete tasks before their associated deadlines, performance and energy consumption also play important roles in many usages of embedded systems. To address these issues, we explore the use of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), a standard feature available on many modern processors for embedded systems. Previous studies often focus on frequency assignment for energy savings and meeting definite task deadlines. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm based on convex optimization techniques to compute energy-efficient processor frequencies for soft real-time tasks. Our novel approach provides performance improvements by allowing definitions of multiple target deadlines for each task. We simulate two versions of our algorithm in MATLAB and evaluate their performance and efficiency. The experimental results show that our strategy leverages performance and energy savings, and can be customized to suit practical applications.

Keywords: DVFS; multiple deadlines; power savings; energy; convex optimization

1. This work is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project numbers 111107, 123207, and 717308) and a Strategic Research Grant of City University of Hong Kong (project numbers 7008039 and 7002464).
2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
3. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong.
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