Periodic Reward-Based Scheduling and Its Application to Power-Aware Real-Time Systems

In this chapter, we introduce Reward-based and Power-aware scheduling frameworks. Reward-based scheduling is based on the principle of trading precision for timeliness and it is particularly suitable for real-time applications when worst-case guarantees cannot be provided due to overload conditions and/or faults. Power-aware scheduling exploits the convex relation between the CPU speed and the power dissipation: it is targeted towards saving energy through the reduction of the CPU speed and the supply voltage. However, utmost care must be exercised in order to still satisfy the timing constraints when using the reduced speed. We show that two frameworks are closely related and we provide an overview of the major research findings in these areas for periodic real-time applications.