Leakage-aware dynamic scheduling for real-time adaptive applications on multiprocessor systems

While performance-adaptable applications are gaining increased popularity on embedded systems (especially multimedia applications), efficient scheduling methods are necessary to explore such feature to achieve the most performance outcome. In addition to conventional scheduling requirements such as real-time and dynamic power, emerging challenges such as leakage power and multiprocessors further complicate the formulation and solution of adaptive application scheduling problems. In this paper, we propose a runtime adaptive application scheduling scheme that efficiently distributes the runtime slack in a task graph, to achieve maximized performance under timing and dynamic/leakage energy constraints. A guided-search heuristics is proposed to select the best-fit frequency levels that maximize the additional program cycles of adaptive tasks. Moreover, we devise a two-stage receiver task selection method that runs efficiently at runtime, in order to quickly find the slack distribution targets. Experiments on synthesized tasks and a JPEG2000 decoder are conducted to justify our approach. Results show that our method achieves at least 25% runtime performance increase compared to contemporary approaches, incurring negligible runtime overhead.