Energy-Efficient Scheduling Algorithms for Periodic Power Management for Real-Time Event Streams

As modern VLSI technology is scaling to the deep sub-micron domain, embedded systems face a power-efficiency problem, i.e., static power consumption caused by the leakage current. This paper explores how to use dynamic power management to reduce static power consumption while guaranteeing hard real-time properties. To tackle event arrivals with non-deterministic patterns, the arrival curve model is adopted to describe event arrivals in the interval domain. To reduce runtime overhead, periodic power management is investigated, which turns on and off a system with a fixed period. To reduce the timing complexity of computing such a periodic scheme, two algorithms, which are based on a linear-segmented representation of the arrival curve model, are proposed to trade the complexity with accuracy for energy reduction. We also present simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.