An Efficient Battery-Aware Task Scheduling Methodology for Portable RC Platforms and Applications

Abstract. In this paper we present a simple yet efficient methodology for battery-aware task execution on FPGAs in portable Reconfigurable Computing (RC) platforms. We divide the reconfigurable area on an FPGA into several fixed reconfigurable slots called Configurable Tiles. We then schedule real-time tasks onto these tiles. Various schedules using different number of tiles are calculated off-line. These schedules along with their execution times are then sent to a run-time scheduler which dynamically decides, which schedule is the most battery efficient. By varying the number of tiles used for scheduling tasks, we can vary the battery usage and lifetime. We tested the methodology by running it on several different task graph structures and sizes, and report an average of 14 % and as high as 21%, less battery capacity used, as compared to nonoptimal execution. Finally, we present a case study where we implement a real-time face recognition algorithm on the iPACE-V1 [6] platform using the proposed methodology and observed 1.3 to 3.3 times improvement in battery life-time.