Hybrid power management in real time embedded systems: an interplay of DVFS and DPM techniques

Abstract

Energy-aware scheduling of real time applications over multiprocessor systems is considered in this paper. Early research reports that while various energy-saving policies, for instance Dynamic Power Management (DPM) and Dynamic Voltage & Frequency scaling (DVFS) policies, perform well individually for a specific set of operating conditions, they often outperform each other under different workload and/or architecture configuration. Thus, no single policy fits perfectly all operating conditions. Instead of designing new policies for specific operating conditions, this paper proposes a generic power/energy management scheme that takes a set of well-known existing (DPM and DVFS) policies, each of which performs well for a set of conditions, and adapts at runtime to the best-performing policy for any given workload. Experiments are performed using state-of the-art DPM and DVFS policies and the results show that our proposed scheme adapts well to the changing workload and always achieves overall energy savings comparable to that of best-performing policy at any point in time.