A Unified Approach to Variable Voltage Scheduling for Nonideal DVS Processors

Abstract

Voltage scheduling is an essential technique used to exploit the benefit of dynamic voltage-scaling processors. Though extensive research exists in this area, current processor limitations such as time and energy transition overhead and voltage-level discretization are often dismissed as insignificant. We show that for hard real-time applications, disregarding these details can lead to suboptimal or even invalid results. We propose two algorithms to account for these limitations. The first is a greedy approach, while the second is more complex, but can significantly reduce the system's energy consumption. Through experimental results on both real and randomly generated systems, we show the effectiveness of both algorithms and explore what conditions make it beneficial to use the complex algorithm over the basic one.