Multi-level feedback control for Quality of Service Management

We consider the problem of power-aware quality of service (QoS) control for soft real-time embedded systems. Applications can have time-varying and scarcely known resource requirements, and can be activated and terminated at any time. However, they have the capability to switch among a discrete set of operation modes with different QoS levels and resource requirements. In addition, the platform provides resources with power-scaling capabilities and may be subject to power constraints. We present a QoS control architecture achieving optimum trade-offs between overall QoS and power consumption of the system, based on two nested control loops. The external one decides dynamically the optimum configuration for the system, in terms of application QoS modes and resource power modes, while the internal one modulates the resource allocations on a job by job basis, so as to respect timing constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by extensive simulations with trace data of real multimedia applications.