A Survey of Techniques For Improving Energy Efficiency in Embedded Computing Systems

Recent technological advances have greatly improved the performance and features of embedded systems. With the number of just mobile devices now reaching nearly equal to the population of earth, embedded systems have truly become ubiquitous. These trends, however, have also made the task of managing their power consumption extremely challenging. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we survey the techniques for managing power consumption of embedded systems. We discuss the need of power management and provide a classification of the techniques on several important parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application-developers in gaining insights into the working of power management techniques and designing even more efficient high-performance embedded systems of tomorrow

On the periodic behavior of real-time schedulers on identical multiprocessor platforms

This paper is proposing a general periodicity result concerning any deterministic and memoryless scheduling algorithm (including non-work-conserving algorithms), for any context, on identical multiprocessor platforms. By context we mean the hardware architecture (uniprocessor, multicore), as well as task constraints like critical sections, precedence constraints, self-suspension, etc. Since the result is based only on the releases and deadlines, it is independent from any other parameter. Note that we do not claim that the given interval is minimal, but it is an upper bound for any cycle of any feasible schedule provided by any deterministic and memoryless scheduler

Schedulability analysis of timed CSP models using the PAT model checker

Timed CSP can be used to model and analyse real-time and concurrent behaviour of embedded control systems. Practical CSP implementations combine the CSP model of a real-time control system with prioritized scheduling to achieve efficient and orderly use of limited resources. Schedulability analysis of a timed CSP model of a system with respect to a scheduling scheme and a particular execution platform is important to ensure that the system design satisfies its timing requirements. In this paper, we propose a framework to analyse schedulability of CSP-based designs for non-preemptive fixed-priority multiprocessor scheduling. The framework is based on the PAT model checker and the analysis is done with dense-time model checking on timed CSP models. We also provide a schedulability analysis workflow to construct and analyse, using the proposed framework, a timed CSP model with scheduling from an initial untimed CSP model without scheduling. We demonstrate our schedulability analysis workflow on a case study of control software design for a mobile robot. The proposed approach provides non-pessimistic schedulability results