Energy minimization with soft real-time and DVS for uniprocessor and multiprocessor embedded systems

Energy-saving is extremely important in real-time embedded systems. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is one of the prime techniques used to achieve energy-saving. Due to the uncertainties in execution times of some tasks of systems, this paper models each varied execution time as a random variable. By using probabilistic approach, we propose two optimal algorithms, one for uniprocessor and one for multiprocessor to explore soft real-time embedded systems and avoid over-designing them. Our goal is to minimize the expected total energy consumption while satisfying the timing constraint with a guaranteed confidence probability. The solutions can be applied to both hard and soft real-time systems. The experimental results show that our approach achieves significant energy-saving than previous work.