Fault-Tolerant Energy Management for Real-Time Systems with Weakly Hard QoS Assurance

Abstract

While energy consumption is the primary concern for the design of real-time embedded systems, fault-tolerance and quality of service (QoS) are becoming increasingly important in the development of today’s pervasive computing systems. In this work, we study the problem of energy-aware standby-sparing for weakly hard real-time embedded systems. The standby-sparing systems adopt a primary processor and a spare processor to provide fault tolerance for both permanent and transient faults. In order to reduce energy consumption for such kind of systems, we proposed two novel scheduling schemes: one for (1,1)-hard tasks and one for general (m,k)-hard tasks which require that at least m out of any k consecutive jobs of a task meet their deadlines. Through extensive evaluations, our results demonstrate that the proposed techniques significantly outperform the previous research in reducing energy consumption for both (1,1)-hard task sets and general (m,k)-hard task sets while assuring fault tolerance through standby-sparing.