Discrete feedback-based dynamic voltage scaling for safety critical real-time systems

Recently, the tradeoff between low energy consumption and high fault-tolerance has attracted a lot of attention as a key issue in the design of real-time systems. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is commonly employed as one of the most effective low energy techniques for real-time systems. It has been observed that the use of feedback-based methods can improve the effectiveness of DVS-enabled systems. In this paper, we have investigated reducing the energy consumption of fault-tolerant hard real-time systems using the feedback control theory. Our proposed method makes the system capable of selecting the proper frequency and voltage settings in order to reduce the energy consumption, while guaranteeing hard real-time requirements in the presence of unpredictable workload fluctuations and faults. In the proposed method, the available slack-time is exploited by a feedback-based DVS at runtime to reduce the energy consumption. Furthermore, some slack-time is reserved for re-execution in case of faults. The simulation results show that compared with the traditional DVS method, our proposed method not only provides up to 59% energy saving, but also satisfies hard real-time constraints. Our proposed method is also effective in harnessing the static energy. The transition overheads are also taken into account in our simulation experiments.