Scheduling for energy efficiency and fault tolerance in hard real-time systems

This paper studies the dilemma between fault tolerance and energy efficiency in frame-based real-time systems. Given a set of K tasks to be executed on a system that supports L voltage levels, the proposed heuristic-based scheduling technique minimizes the energy consumption of tasks execution when faults are absent, and preserves feasibility under the worst case of fault occurrences. The proposed technique first finds out the optimal solution in a comparable system that supports continuous voltage scaling, then converts the solution to the original system. The runtime complexity is only (LK²). Experimental results show that the proposed approach produces near-optimal results in polynomial time.