Demonstrating the Effects of Power Management on a Real-time Operating System

This thesis is part of the GEODES project, dealing with the issues of power optimization, e.g. how to make a systems lifetime longer, at the cost of the quality of the performance, this is called system degradation. The objective for this project was develop an application to monitor and visualize the effects of power management (controlled system degradation to minimize power consumption). With such software it is possible to demonstrate the possibilities of so called energy aware systems. During the project two scenarios were investigated and implemented, one is a simple state-based monitor. This monitor application can observe and visualize the effects of power management on a computer system. It shows that by utilizing system degradation, the lifetime of a system can be prolonged. The other scenario consists of a prototype for a firefighter coordinator application. It allows a rescue leader to observe firefighters at an emergency scene. This application can interact with the power management, by requesting a desired life time of a hand-held device carried by the firefighter. This shows that these techniques can be utilized without knowledge of the underlying power management software