An Energy Efficient Message Passing Synchronization Algorithm for Concurrent Data Structures in Embedded Systems

Abstract

Nowadays, modern multicore embedded systems often execute complex applications that rely heavily on concurrent data structures. Databases on embedded microservers, file systems and stream processing algorithms belong in application domains that normally utilize concurrent data structures to store and process their data. The prevalent lock-based synchronization methods based on mutexes provide poor scalability and, most importantly, they lead to high energy consumption, which is an important constraint on embedded systems. In this work, we propose an energy efficient synchronization model for embedded system architectures based on message-passing communication. Our results show that concurrent data structures based on the proposed model provide lower power consumption in comparison with the corresponding lock-based implementations, along with comparable performance.