Real-time Task Scheduling Methods to Incorporate Low-power Techniques of Processors and Memory in IoT Environments

Abstract

Due to the recent advances in IoT technologies, reducing power consumption in battery-based IoT devices becomes an important issue. An IoT device is a kind of real-time systems, and processor voltage scaling is known to be effective in reducing power consumption. However, recent research has shown that power consumption in memory increases dramatically in such systems. This paper aims at combining processor voltage scaling and low-power NVRAM technologies to reduce power consumption further. Our main idea is that if a task is schedulable in a lower voltage mode of a processor, we can expect that the task will still be schedulable even on slow NVRAM memory. We incorporate the NVRAM memory allocation problem into processor voltage scaling, and evaluate the effectiveness of the combined approach.