Energy Management for Fault-Tolerant (m,k)-Constrained Real-Time Systems that Use Standby-Sparing

Fault tolerance, energy management, and quality of service (QoS) are essential aspects for the design of real-time embedded systems. In this work, we focus on exploring methods that can simultaneously address the above three critical issues under standby-sparing. The standby-sparing mechanism adopts a dual-processor architecture in which each processor plays the role of the backup for the other one dynamically. In this way it can provide fault tolerance subject to both permanent and transient faults. Due to its duplicate executions of the real-time jobs/tasks, the energy consumption of a standby-sparing system could be quite high. With the purpose of reducing energy under standby-sparing, we proposed three novel scheduling schemes: the first one is for (1, 1)-constrained tasks, and the second one and the third one (which can be combined into an integrated approach to maximize the overall energy reduction) are for general (m, k)-constrained tasks which require that among any k consecutive jobs of a task no more than (k − m) out of them could miss their deadlines. Through extensive evaluations and performance analysis, our results demonstrate that compared with the existing research, the proposed techniques can reduce energy by up to 11% for (1, 1)-constrained tasks and 25% for general (m, k)-constrained tasks while assuring (m, k)-constraints and fault tolerance as well as providing better user perceived QoS levels under standby-sparing.