GreenRT: A Framework for the Design of Power-Aware Soft Real-Time Applications

While soft real-time applications must run quickly enough to meet the deadline, there is usually no extra benefit from running more quickly than that. This property provides the opportunity for energy savings using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). In this paper, the authors propose the GreenRT framework that allows an application to monitor its own progress, and subsequently adjust the processor frequency dynamically to meet the deadline. Their approach assumes the application can be subdivided into well-defined sub-tasks, each with quantifiable input and output sizes. Using information from the application's past history, the algorithm estimates the amount of input that will be passed into and generated by each sub-task.