AaltOS for energy harvesting applications: Effects of clock frequency and system tick on power and energy consumption

Abstract

Real-time operating system (RTOS) is a common part of today's embedded systems. The use of RTOS provides an organized and maintainable programming environment for developers. In battery-operated wireless sensor nodes, the energy and power consumption measures have become of great importance. At the same time, the fundamental importance of real-time performance cannot be compromised. In this paper, we present a case study that clarifies the relation between energy and power consumption in a traffic-light control application, running on our aaltOS real-time kernel, in the 8-bit Atmel ATmega 2560 environment. Our study focuses on analyzing the relation between energy consumption and CPU usage of the application when operated at different clock frequencies and using different RTOS tick periods. Based on the results of the experiments, we discuss the usability of aaltOS for Energy Harvesting Applications.