Fault-tolerant and power-aware scheduling in embedded real-time systems

More and more power-aware real-time embedded systems use DVFS (dynamic voltage / frequency scaling) technology to save energy and prolong battery life. DVFS technology reduces the power consumption by reducing the working frequency of the processor, but it will increase task’s execution time, which is not conducive to guarantee the real-time schedulability and reliability for real-time tasks in the embedded systems. The paper proposed the a novel fault-tolerant power-aware real-time scheduling algorithm, which included two parts: offline tasks assignment and online energy-saving scheme by DVFS. The algorithm can not only ensure that the real-time tasks with fault tolerance requirements can be finished before their deadline, but also reduce energy consumption to the great extent. Finally, the simulation experiments reveal that our techniques can save up to 22% and 16% energy respectively compared to the two baseline algorithms.