Procrastination scheduling in fixed priority real-time systems

Abstract

Procrastination scheduling has gained importance for energy efficiency due to the rapid increase in the leakage power consumption. Under procrastination scheduling, task executions are delayed to extend processor shutdown intervals, thereby reducing the idle energy consumption. We propose algorithms to compute the maximum procrastination intervals for tasks scheduled by either the fixed priority or the dual priority scheduling policy. We show that dual priority scheduling always guarantees longer shutdown intervals than fixed priority scheduling. We further combine procrastination scheduling with dynamic voltage scaling to minimize the total static and dynamic energy consumption of the system. Our simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithms can extend the sleep intervals up to 5 times while meeting the timing requirements. The results show up to 18% energy gains over dynamic voltage scaling.