Fault-Tolerant Scheduling for Periodic Tasks based on DVFS

Abstract

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique is emerging in various battery-operated embedded systems to reduce the energy consumption and prolong the working life of the system. However, DVFS technology has been proved to have some direct and negative effects on the reliability of the system. Most existing schedulers of real-time tasks based on DVFS only focus on minimizing energy consumption without taking the fault-tolerant into account. To solve this problem, in this study, we developed a novel energy-aware fault-tolerant (EAFT) technique that was tailored for the real-time periodic tasks. The heuristic EAFT balances the allocation of slacks used for reducing energy consumption and used for re-executing the failed tasks. The simulation results showed that the proposed reliability-aware schemes could guarantee the system reliability and significantly save energy comparing to the existing allocating schemes.