Dynamic runtime re-scheduling allowing multiple implementations of a task for platform-based designs

This paper introduces an extension to the RMS scheduling technique that we call "hot swapping". Hot swapping enables a system to choose between various selected implementations of one task on-the-fly and thus to optimize the system\´s cost (e.g. power savings). The on-the-fly swapping between those implementations requires extra time to save and/or transform states of a certain task implementation. Even if the two steady-state schedules before and after the swapping are feasible, the transient schedule with the additional swapping computation time may exceed the system\´s capacity. Our technique is an extension to rate monotonic scheduling (RMS). While maintaining and meeting performance requirements, our technique shows an average reduction of 31% in power consumption compared to systems using a pure static scheduling approach (RMS) that cannot make use of task swapping. We have evaluated our algorithm through simulation of five real-world task sets and in addition by use of a large number of generated task sets