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Operating Energy-Neutral Real-Time Systems

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Published:29 August 2017Publication History
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Abstract

Energy-neutral real-time systems harvest the entire energy they use from their environment. In such systems, energy must be treated as an equally important resource as time, which creates the need to solve a number of problems that so far have not been addressed by traditional real-time systems. In particular, this includes the scheduling of tasks with both time and energy constraints, the monitoring of energy budgets, as well as the survival of blackout periods during which not enough energy is available to keep the system fully operational.

In this article, we address these issues presenting EnOS, an operating-system kernel for energy-neutral real-time systems. EnOS considers mixed time criticality levels for different energy criticality modes, which enables a decoupling of time and energy constraints when one is considered less critical than the other. When switching the energy criticality mode, the system also changes the set of executed tasks and is therefore able to dynamically adapt its energy consumption depending on external conditions. By keeping track of the energy budget available, EnOS ensures that in case of a blackout the system state is safely stored to persistent memory, allowing operations to resume at a later point when enough energy is harvested again.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
      ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 17, Issue 1
      Special Issue on Autonomous Battery-Free Sensing and Communication, Special Issue on ESWEEK 2016 and Regular Papers
      January 2018
      630 pages
      ISSN:1539-9087
      EISSN:1558-3465
      DOI:10.1145/3136518
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2017 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 29 August 2017
      • Accepted: 1 April 2017
      • Revised: 1 January 2017
      • Received: 1 June 2016
      Published in tecs Volume 17, Issue 1

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