Intra-task scheduling for storage-less and converter-less solar-powered nonvolatile sensor nodes

Solar-powered sensor nodes without specific energy maintenance have shown great promise in many applications, but they suffer from large energy storage and power converter loss. The storage-less and converter-less architecture with nonvolatile processing units has been proposed to reduce the energy loss. However, the architecture is sensitive to solar variations, since there is no energy buffering. Traditional inter-task scheduling methods may not work well due to large variations of task execution time. To tackle the challenge, we develop an algorithm for intra-task scheduling to achieve better quality of service. The experimental results show that the intra-task scheduling algorithm reduces deadline miss rate by as much as 35% and improves energy utilization by close to 20%.