Research Initiation Award: QoS-Aware Energy Management for Sustainable Real-Time Embedded Systems

Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences.

The award to West Virginia State University has potential broader impacts in a number of areas. The goal of the project is identify a unified power management solution for real-time embedded systems (RTES) in order to maximally lower ES energy consumption while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) constraint and system reliability requirements. Undergraduate students will gain research experiences.

In this project, traditional real-time scheduling technology is leveraged to create a scheduling framework in the design of energy-efficient embedded systems, exploiting modern power-management features without sacrificing system performance. Three specific aims are to: develop energy-efficient scheduling algorithms that can reduce energy consumption for weakly hard real-time embedded systems while preserving the system reliability; develop algorithms to create a scheduling framework that can maximize the QoS for reliable RTES under hard energy budget constraint; and extend this scheduling framework to multicore platforms.

The novel feature of the project is the combination of the three critical dimensions of RTES design - energy efficiency, quality of service, and reliability - into a single, unified framework to reduce energy consumption of real-time embedded systems from the system level. The findings will shift how embedded systems are designed to be able to meet performance demands on a green and sustainable computing platform.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.