The modeling and analysis of real-time applications focus on the worst-case scenario because of their strict timing requirements. However, many real-time embedded systems include critical applications requiring not only timing constraints but also other system limitations, such as energy consumption. In this paper, we study the energy-aware real-time scheduling of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) tasks. We integrate the Dynamic Power Management (DPM) policy to reduce the Worst-Case Energy Consumption (WCEC), which is an essential requirement for energy-constrained systems. Besides, we extend our analysis with tasks’ probabilistic information to improve the Average- Case Energy Consumption (ACEC), which is, instead, a common non-functional requirement of embedded systems. To verify the benefits of our approach in terms of reduced energy consumption, we finally conduct an extensive simulation, followed by an experimental study on an Odroid-H2 board. Compared to the state-of-the-art solution, our approach is able to reduce the power consumption up to 32.1%.

Increasingly complex and integrated systems design has led to more timing uncertainty, which may result in pessimism in time-sensitive system design and analysis. To mitigate such pessimism, mixed-criticality (MC) design for real-time systems has been proposed, where highly critical tasks, often with extremely pessimistic execution time estimates, can share the processor with less critical ones in a manner that the latter is sacrificed, completely or partially, to guarantee temporal correctness to the former, when the extremely pessimistic scenario does happen. In contrast to such sacrifice of tasks, the precise MC scheduling model has recently been investigated, where all tasks, including less critical ones, must fully complete their execution in all circumstances. Meanwhile, the processor may operate at a degraded speed when the tasks' runtime behaviors are far from the extreme pessimistic estimates and would recover to the full processing speed once the extremely pessimistic scenario does happen.

The strict requirements on the timing correctness biased the modeling and analysis of real-time systems toward the worst-case performances. Such focus on the worst-case, however, does not provide enough information to effectively steer the resource/energy optimization. In this article, we integrate a probabilistic-based energy prediction strategy with the precise scheduling of mixed-criticality tasks, where the timing correctness must be met for all tasks at all scenarios. The dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is applied to this precise scheduling policy to enable energy minimization. We propose a probabilistic technique to derive an energy-efficient speed (for the processor) that minimizes the average energy consumption, while guaranteeing the (worst-case) timing correctness for all tasks, including LO-criticality ones, under any execution condition. We present a response time analysis for such systems under the nonpreemptive fixed-priority scheduling policy. Finally, we conduct an extensive simulation campaign based on randomly generated task sets to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm (with respect to energy savings) and it reports up to 46% energy-saving.

Energy-efficiency is a critical requirement for computation-intensive real-time applications on multi-core embedded systems. Multi-core processors enable intra-task parallelism, and in this work, we study energy-efficient real-time scheduling of constrained deadline sporadic parallel tasks, where each task is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We consider a clustered multi-core platform where processors within the same cluster run at the same speed at any given time. A new concept named speed-profile is proposed to model per-task and per-cluster energy-consumption variations during run-time to minimize the expected long-term energy consumption. To our knowledge, no existing work considers energy-aware real-time scheduling of DAG tasks with constrained deadlines, nor on a clustered multi-core platform. The proposed energy-aware real-time scheduler is implemented upon an ODROID XU-3 board to evaluate and demonstrate its feasibility and practicality. To complement our system experiments in large-scale, we have also conducted simulations that demonstrate a CPU energy saving of up to 67 percent through our proposed approach compared to existing methods.

With the growth of computation-intensive real-time applications on multi-core embedded systems, energy-efficient real-time scheduling becomes crucial. Multi-core processors enable intra-task parallelism, and there has been much progress on exploiting that, while there has been only a little progress on energy-efficient multi-core real-time scheduling as yet. In this work, we study energy-efficient real-time scheduling of constrained deadline sporadic parallel tasks, where each task is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We consider a clustered multi-core platform where processors within the same cluster run at the same speed at any given time. A new concept named speed-profile is proposed to model per-task and per-cluster energy-consumption variations during run-time to minimize the expected long-term energy consumption. To our knowledge, no existing work considers energy-aware real-time scheduling of DAG tasks with constrained deadlines, nor on a clustered multi-core platform. The proposed energy-aware realtime scheduler is implemented upon an ODROID XU-3 board to evaluate and demonstrate its feasibility and practicality. To complement our system experiments in large-scale, we have also conducted simulations that demonstrate a CPU energy saving of up to 57% through our proposed approach compared to existing methods.

Mixed-criticality (MC) scheduling of sequential tasks (with no intra-task parallelism) has been well-explored by the real-time systems community. However, till date, there has been little progress on MC scheduling of parallel tasks. MC scheduling of parallel tasks is highly challenging due to the requirement of various assurances under different criticality levels. In this work, we address the MC scheduling of parallel tasks of gang model that allows workloads to execute on multiple cores simultaneously. Such a workload model represents an efficient mode-based parallel processing scheme with many potential applications. To schedule such task sets, we propose a new technique GEDF-VD, which integrates Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) and Earliest Deadline First with Virtual Deadline (EDF-VD). We prove the correctness of GEDF-VD and provide a detailed quantitative evaluation in terms of speedup bound in both the MC and the non-MC cases. Specifically, we show that GEDF provides a speedup bound of 2 for non-MC gang tasks, while the speedup for GEDF-VD considering MC gang tasks is √5 + 1. Experiments on randomly generated gang task sets are conducted to validate our theoretical findings and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The traditional mixed-criticality (MC) model does not allow less critical tasks to execute during an event of the error and exception. Recently, the imprecise MC (IMC) model has been proposed where, even for exceptional events, less critical tasks also receive some amount of (degraded) service, e.g., a task overruns its execution demand. In this work, we present our ongoing effort to extend the IMC model to the precise scheduling of tasks and integrate with the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheme to enable energy minimization. Precise scheduling of MC systems is highly challenging because of its requirement to simultaneously guarantee the timing correctness of all tasks under both pessimistic and less pessimistic assumptions. We propose an utilization-based schedulability test and sufficient schedulability conditions for such systems under earliest deadline first with virtual deadline (EDF-VD) scheduling policy. For this unified model, we present a quantitative study in the forms of speedup bound and approximation ratio. Finally, both theoretical and experimental analysis will be conducted to prove the correctness of our algorithm and to demonstrate its effectiveness.

This work studies energy-aware real-time scheduling of a set of sporadic Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) tasks with implicit deadlines. While meeting all real-time constraints, we try to identify the best task allocation and execution pattern such that the average power consumption of the whole platform is minimized. To our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the power consumption issue in scheduling multiple DAG tasks on multi-cores and allows intra-task processor sharing. First, we adapt the decomposition-based framework for federated scheduling and propose an energy-sub-optimal scheduler. Then, we derive an approximation algorithm to identify processors to be merged together for further improvements in energy-efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated both theoretically via approximation ratio bounds and also experimentally through simulation study. Experimental results on randomly generated workloads show that our algorithms achieve an energy saving of 60% to 68% compared to existing DAG task schedulers.

In this work, we study energy-aware real-time scheduling of a set of sporadic Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) tasks with implicit deadlines. While meeting all real-time constraints, we try to identify the best task allocation and execution pattern such that the average power consumption of the whole platform is minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the power consumption issue in scheduling multiple DAG tasks on multi-cores and allows intra-task processor sharing. We first adapt the decomposition-based framework for federated scheduling and propose an energy-sub-optimal scheduler. Then we derive an approximation algorithm to identify processors to be merged together for further improvements in energy-efficiency and to prove the bound of the approximation ratio. We perform a simulation study to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheduling. The simulation results show that our algorithms achieve an energy saving of 27% to 41% compared to existing DAG task schedulers.