Power Consumption Prediction in Real-Time Multitasking Systems

The paper presents a practical methodology for the prediction of power consumption of a multitask real-time system. The authors briefly recall the structure of the original multitasking time-predictable system. The system has a regular and scalable architecture. It consists of many cores based on pipeline processing with threads’ interleaving mechanism. In previous works, the authors have presented a number of issues related to the methodology of designing a time-predictable system and the scheduling of hardware threads with different design goals and constraints. The current article presents an accurate method for measuring the dynamic power dissipated in a system for various scenarios and the system configuration. The proposed approach is based on continuous monitoring of the power consumed by the FPGA, transmitting the measurements to the computer from the measuring device, and online analysis of the obtained results. The authors based their power estimation method on the original task frequency factor (TF). A theoretical analysis was made, and a series of practical experiments were carried out. The results obtained enable accurate estimation of the power requirements for the tasks performed in the real-time system. The presented technique can be useful during the design stage of multitasking real-time systems.