A dynamic slack management technique for real-time distributed embedded systems

This work presents a novel slack management technique, the Service Rate Based Slack Distribution Technique, for dynamic real-time distributed embedded systems targeting the reduction and management of energy consumption. Energy minimization is critical for devices such as laptop computers, PCS telephones, PDAs and other mobile and embedded computing systems simply because it leads to extended battery lifetime. Such systems being power hungry rely greatly upon the system design and algorithms for processing, slack and power management. This work presents an effcient dynamic slack management scheme for an energy aware design of such systems. The proposed Service Rate Based Slack Distribution Technique has been considered with two static(FCFS, WRR) and two dynamic(EDF, RBS) scheduling schemes used most commonly in distributed systems. A fault tolerance mechanism has also been incorporated into the proposed technique inorder to use the available dynamic slack to maintain checkpoints and provide for rollbacks on faults. Results show that in comparion to contemporary techniques, the proposed Service Rate Based Slack Distribution Technique provides for about 29% more perfor-mance/overhead savings when validated with real world and random benchmarks.