A Real-Time Embedded Platform for Mixed Energy-Criticality Systems

In this paper, an innovative mixed energy-criticality system (MECS) is proposed for which a set of periodic real-time tasks can be executed on a battery-powered or an energy-harvesting embedded system with different energy-efficient requirements. We assume that a task has multiple versions corresponding to different energy-criticality levels, where a version for a higher level has less computation than that for a lower level. Initially, an MECS starts with the lowest energy-criticality level, and it switches to a higher level whenever there is no sufficient energy available. Note that it also changes the version of tasks to their corresponding versions for the higher level so that the less amount of computation is executed and the lifetime can be prolonged. We also present a real-time embedded platform and an example real-life MECS application is implemented on it to demonstrate the performance and the energy efficiency, for which we have some encouraging results.