Real-Time Task Scheduling on Intermittently Powered Batteryless Devices

Abstract

Intermittently powered devices (IPDs) have gained much interest in recent years. However, scheduling real-time tasks while supporting data consistency, timekeeping, and schedulability guarantees on these devices still remains a challenge. Many sensing tasks need long indivisible sensor reading operations, but most prior work has limited their focus to the forward progress of computation-only tasks. In this article, we propose a scheduling framework to execute real-time periodic tasks with atomic sensing operations. Our proposed method keeps track of time progress and ensures the periodic execution of sensing tasks while efficiently utilizing intermittent power sources. We provide schedulability analysis to determine if a taskset is schedulable under a given charging condition. As a proof-of-concept, we design a custom programmable RFID tag device, called R'tag, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in a realistic sensing application. Evaluation results show that the proposed method satisfies the real-time task execution requirements on IPDs in terms of task scheduling, timekeeping, and periodic sensing while significantly outperforming prior work.