A Multi-Speed Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling Scheme for Multicore Real-Time Systems

Abstract

DVFS (dynamic voltage /frequency scaling) is a well-known and prevalent low power technique in processor components. This article proposes a DVFS scheme for multicore real-time systems. The proposed scheme divides the worst-case processor time of a real-time task into multiple sections and associates different speed with each section in increasing order. As a job executes and progresses, its speed increases according to the speed associated with the sections. If a job's actual execution requirement is smaller than its worst-case execution requirement, the job starts and executes at a low speed. The amount of consumed energy is less than the worst case. We integrate and evaluate the scheme with a multicore real-time scheduling. The results show that our multi-speed scheme can save energy consumption by up to 6.99% compared with the individual speed scheme. And we also show that our scheme performs better as the number of sections increases.