Dynamic slack reclamation with procrastination scheduling in real-time embedded systems

Leakage energy consumption is an increasing concern in current and future CMOS technology generations. Procrastination scheduling, where task execution can be delayed to maximize the duration of idle intervals, has been proposed to minimize leakage energy drain. The authors addressed dynamic slack reclamation techniques under procrastination scheduling to minimize the static and dynamic energy consumption. In addition to dynamic task slowdown, a dynamic procrastination was proposed, which seeks to extend idle intervals through slack reclamation. While using the entire slack for either slowdown or procrastination need not be the most energy efficient approach, the slack was distributed between slowdown and procrastination to exploit maximum energy savings. The simulation experiments showed that dynamic slowdown result on an average 10% energy gains over static slowdown. Dynamic procrastination extends the average sleep interval by 25%, which reduces the idle energy consumption by 15%, while meeting all timing requirements.