A Design Approach for Real-Time Embedded Systems with Energy and Code Size Constraints

Real-time embedded systems often have multiple resource constraints such as energy and code size constraints. Traditionally, techniques for reducing energy consumption for real-time embedded systems have been developed without considering code size constraints, whereas code size reduction techniques have been developed without considering energy constraints. There, however, is a tradeoff relationship between reducing dynamic energy consumption and reducing code size for real-time embedded systems. Therefore, reducing code size may result in increasing energy consumption. In this paper, we present a triple-tradeoff relationship among code size, execution time, and energy consumption and then address the code size minimization problem while considering simultaneously the energy constraints and the real-time requirements of embedded systems. We formulate such an optimization problem and prove this optimization problem is NP-hard. Given the difficulty of finding the optimal solution to the problem, we then propose four heuristic algorithms to find sub-optimal solutions and evaluate their performance through simulations.