An Online Holistic Scheduling Framework for Energy-Constrained Wireless Real-Time Systems

We consider wireless real-time systems that execute computationally-intensive applications and must transmit packets over the network in a timely manner. Existing methods do not consider the importance (i.e., urgency) of a packet as perceived by end users in conjunction with energy consumption, real-time task deadlines, and packet deadlines, inadvertently causing packet priority inversion during transmissions and possibly starvation of some streams. We present an online holistic scheduling framework that explicitly considers packet importance to select packets to transmit and guarantee their deadline requirements using both packet and energy-aware job assignment and scheduling. Our framework is applicable to wireless real-time systems equipped with either a single processor or a multicore system. Based on extensive simulations, we show that our proposed method allows for timely transmissions of the most important packets, which helps to control packet urgency, while saving processor(s) energy.