A Dynamic Slack Management Technique for Real-Time Distributed Embedded Systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 57; no. 2; pp. 215 - 230
• Main Authors: Acharya, S., Mahapatra, R.N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-02-2008; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmarks; Dynamic scheduling; Dynamical systems; Dynamics; Embedded system; Energy efficiency; Energy Efficient; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Faults; Management; Periodic Service Rate; Power demand; Program processors; Real time; Real time systems; Scheduling; Slack; Real-Time; Energy Efficient; Slack; fault-tolerance; Periodic Service Rate
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2007.70789

This work presents a novel slack management technique, the service-rate-proportionate (SRP) slack distribution, for real-time distributed embedded systems to reduce energy consumption. The proposed SRP-based slack distribution technique has been considered with EDF and rate-based scheduling schemes that are most commonly used with embedded systems. A fault-tolerant mechanism has also been incorporated into the proposed technique in order to utilize the available dynamic slack to maintain checkpoints and provide for rollbacks on faults. Results show that, in comparison to contemporary techniques, the proposed SRP slack distribution technique achieves about 29 percent more performance/overhead improvement benefits when validated with random and real-world benchmarks.