Feedback-controlled reliability-aware power management for real-time embedded systems

Abstract

In recent literature it has been reported that Dynamic Power Management (DPM) may lead to decreased reliability in real-time embedded systems. The ever-shrinking device sizes contribute further to this problem. In this paper, we present a reliability aware power management algorithm that aims at reducing energy consumption while preserving the overall system reliability. The idea behind the proposed scheme is to utilize the dynamic slack to scale down processes while ensuring that the overall system reliability does not reduce drastically. The proposed algorithm employs a proportional feedback controller to keep track of the overall miss ratio of a system of tasks and provide additional level of fault-tolerance based on demand. It was tested with both real-world and synthetic task sets and simulation results have been presented. Both fixed and dynamic priority scheduling policies have been considered for demonstration of results.