Navigating Time and Energy Tradeoffs in Reactive Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

Reactive software poses challenging requirements: deterministic execution with stringent timing constraints under a tight energy budget. Meeting these requirements is particularly hard when executing on the increasingly heterogeneous platforms of today. In this letter, we integrate Mocasin, a design space exploration tool, into Lingua Franca, a programming framework for building deterministic and timed reactive software. We show that this integration enables choosing a desired timing and energy performance at design time. We demonstrate our approach in satellite attitude control, consisting of periodic real-time tasks and sporadic non-real-time tasks. The latter sporadic tasks are coordinated using quasi-static schedules, computed by Mocasin, leading to less energy consumption compared to the Linux scheduler under CPU frequency scaling governors, such as powersave, schedutil, and ondemand.