Online Power-Managing Strategy with Hard Real-Time Guarantees

TL;DR

This paper addresses online dynamic power management with hard real-time guarantees, proposing algorithms that balance energy efficiency and processor usage while providing competitive performance bounds.

Contribution

It introduces online algorithms with proven competitive ratios for energy-efficient scheduling under real-time constraints, including a trade-off mechanism for processor count.

Findings

Competitive ratio of at least 2.06 for any online algorithm.

Proposed online algorithm achieves a 4-competitive schedule.

Improved competitive ratio of 3.59 for unit execution time jobs.

Abstract

We consider the problem of online dynamic power management that provides hard real-time guarantees. In this problem, each of the given jobs is associated with an arrival time, a deadline, and an execution time, and the objective is to decide a schedule of the jobs as well as a sequence of state transitions on the processors so as to minimize the total energy consumption. In this paper, we examine the problem complexity and provide online strategies to achieve energy-efficiency. First, we show that the competitive factor of any online algorithm for this problem is at least 2.06. Then we present an online algorithm which gives a 4-competitive schedule. When the execution times of the jobs are unit, we show that the competitive factor improves to 3.59. At the end, the algorithm is generalized to allow a trade-off between the number of processors we use and the energy-efficiency of the resulting schedule.