Energy Models of Real Time Operating Systems on FPGA

Saadia Dhouib, Jean-Philippe Diguet, Eric Senn and Johan Laurent

Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time applications (OSPERT 2008)
Prague, Czech Republic, July 1 2008

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Summary

This paper introduces a methodology for modeling power and energy consumption of embedded systems running operating systems. We notice that internal services of the operating system such as interprocess communications, scheduling, context switches are not the major cause of power and energy consumption in an embedded system. Based on this observation, we have applied our methodology to embedded peripheral devices managed by the operating system. The proposed model is general. In this paper, it is illustrated by the Ethernet standard peripheral device. We analyze the key parameters affecting its power and energy consumption and focus on the relationship between energy consumption and software and hardware parameters like the transmission protocol and the frequency of the processor. Then, we propose a power and energy consumption model, the parameters of which are set after real measurements. Experimental results are presented for Montavista Linux, an RTOS ported and executed on the XUP Virtex-II pro development board embedding a powerpc processor.

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