Applying Pay-Burst-Only-Once Principle for Periodic Power Management in Hard Real-Time Pipelined Multiprocessor Systems

Pipelined computing is a promising paradigm for embedded system design. Designing a power management policy to reduce the power consumption of a pipelined system with nondeterministic workload is, however, nontrivial. In this article, we study the problem of energy minimization for coarse-grained pipelined systems under hard real-time constraints and propose new approaches based on an inverse use of the pay-burst-only-once principle. We formulate the problem by means of the resource demands of individual pipeline stages and propose two new approaches, a quadratic programming-based approach and fast heuristic, to solve the problem. In the quadratic programming approach, the problem is transformed into a standard quadratic programming with box constraint and then solved by a standard quadratic programming solver. Observing the problem is NP-hard, the fast heuristic is designed to solve the problem more efficiently. Our approach is scalable with respect to the numbers of pipeline stages. Simulation results using real-life applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.