A Context-Switch Reduction Heuristic for Power-Aware Off-Line Scheduling

Scheduling algorithms significantly affect the performance of a real-time system. In systems with power constraints, context switches in a schedule result in wasted power consumption. We present a scheduling algorithm and a heuristic for reducing the number of context switches. The algorithm executes in near linear time in terms of the number of jobs, finds a feasible schedule in most cases if it exists, and reasonably reduces the number of context switches. Thus it is a power-aware scheduling algorithm.