Performance-Aware Power Management in Embedded Controllers with Multiple-Voltage Processors

TL;DR

This paper presents a performance-aware power management scheme for embedded controllers with multi-voltage processors, enhancing energy efficiency by adapting control task periods and reclaiming resources, while maintaining control quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online adaptation method for control task periods combined with resource reclaiming to improve energy savings over standard DVS in embedded systems.

Findings

Significantly reduces energy consumption compared to standard DVS.

Maintains comparable quality of control (QoC).

Enhances CPU utilization through resource reclaiming.

Abstract

The goal of this work is to minimize the energy dissipation of embedded controllers without jeopardizing the quality of control (QoC). Taking advantage of the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technology, this paper develops a performance-aware power management scheme for embedded controllers with processors that allow multiple voltage levels. The periods of control tasks are adapted online with respect to the current QoC, thus facilitating additional energy reduction over standard DVS. To avoid the waste of CPU resources as a result of the discrete voltage levels, a resource reclaiming mechanism is employed to maximize the CPU utilization and also to improve the QoC. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Compared with the optimal standard DVS scheme, the proposed scheme is shown to be able to save remarkably more energy while maintaining comparable QoC.