Optimizing Energy in Non-Preemptive Mixed-Criticality Scheduling by Exploiting Probabilistic Information

The strict requirements on the timing correctness biased the modeling and analysis of real-time systems toward the worst-case performances. Such focus on the worst-case, however, does not provide enough information to effectively steer the resource/energy optimization. In this article, we integrate a probabilistic-based energy prediction strategy with the precise scheduling of mixed-criticality tasks, where the timing correctness must be met for all tasks at all scenarios. The dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is applied to this precise scheduling policy to enable energy minimization. We propose a probabilistic technique to derive an energy-efficient speed (for the processor) that minimizes the average energy consumption, while guaranteeing the (worst-case) timing correctness for all tasks, including LO-criticality ones, under any execution condition. We present a response time analysis for such systems under the nonpreemptive fixed-priority scheduling policy. Finally, we conduct an extensive simulation campaign based on randomly generated task sets to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm (with respect to energy savings) and it reports up to 46% energy-saving.