Energy-Efficient Scheduling in Nonpreemptive Systems With Real-Time Constraints

In the past decade, the development of mobile and embedded systems has demanded energy efficiency for improving the lifetime of embedded devices. To avoid preemption overhead or ease timing verification, nonpreemptive scheduling has been deemed useful or necessary in meeting system timing requirements for certain applications built on embedded devices. In this paper, our aim is to design nonpreemptive scheduling algorithms that ensure timing correctness and optimize energy consumption on a processor with variable speeds. We propose a representative algorithm, ISA, which can produce lower speeds for a variety of nonpreemptive task sets than other comparable methods, and hence resulting in significant energy savings. When combined with a selective frequency-inheritance policy we design to efficiently determine if processor speedup can be disabled without jeopardizing any task deadlines, ISA can achieve even larger gains, up to 30% reduction in energy consumption. Finally, we propose a dynamic slack reclamation policy built on ISA, namely ISA-DR, which can result in additional energy savings when a task consumes less than its worst-case execution time.