In recent times, smart hand-held devices, sensor networks and pervasive computing have proliferated vastly. These devices contain embedded processors and are energy/ resource constrained. New processor technologies incorporate dynamic voltage scaling offering opportunity to optimize real-time task scheduling from the energy perspective. Often, due to uncertainties in their environment, tasks overrun their average case execution time resulting in possible overload in the system. In such systems, over provisioning done by traditional scheduling algorithms based on worst-case execution times, is undesirable as the peak load may be orders of magnitude greater than the envisaged average load. Several new overload handling techniques are discussed here that are useful with soft task deadlines. The book presents 20 new task-scheduling algorithms that take care of work overload and energy efficiency in soft real time embedded systems. This book should be of great interest to postgraduate and research students of Computer Engineering, Electronics/ Communication Engineering as well as practicing engineers designing embedded real time systems in energy/ resource constrained environments.
