Energy efficient task assignment with guaranteed probability satisfying timing constraints for embedded systems

The trade-off between system performance and energy efficiency (service time) is critical for battery-based embedded systems. Most of the previous work focuses on saving energy in a deterministic way by taking the average or worst scenario into account. However, such deterministic approaches usually are inappropriate in modeling energy consumption because of uncertainties in conditional instructions on processors and time-varying external environments (e.g., fluctuant network bandwidth and different user inputs). By adopting a probabilistic approach, this paper proposes a model and a set of algorithms to address the Processor and Voltage Assignment with Probability (PVAP) problem of data-dependent aperiodic tasks in real-time embedded systems, ensuring that all the tasks can be done under the time constraint with a guaranteed probability. We adopt a task DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) to model the PVAP problem. We first use a processor scheduling algorithm to map the task DAG onto a set of voltage-variable processors, and then use our dynamic programming algorithm to assign a proper voltage to each task. Finally, to escape from local optima, a local search with restarts searches the optimal solution from candidate solutions by updating the objective function, until the stop criteria are reached or a time bound is elapsed. The experimental results demonstrate that for probability 1.0, our approach yields slightly better results than the well-known algorithms like ASAP/ALAP (As Soon As Possible/As Late As Possible) and ILP (Integer Linear Programming) with/without DVS (Dynamic Voltage Scaling). However, for probabilities 0.8 and 0.9, our approach significantly outperforms those algorithms (maximum improvement of 50.3 percent).