Scheduling and Power Management Facilities in Linux/RTAI for Real-time Systems powered by Ambient Energy Source

National audienceIn this paper, we present a component-based development project dedicated to real-time embedded harvesting systems. Energy harvesting consists in converting the ambient energy into electricity to power electronic devices, making them self-sufficient. Instead of minimizing its energy consumption, such a system must operate in a so-called energy neutral mode by consuming only as much energy as harvested in the environment. Consequently, our objective is to develop and integrate power management and scheduling facilities specifically adapted to energy harvesting embedded systems with real-time constraints. For example, these system level facilities have to make on-line decisions such as : when should the system use energy (i.e. active state) and when should it recharge the energy storage (i.e. idle state) ? We are providing these facilities as open-source software components. Adding them to the existing open-source CLEOPATRE library based on Linux/RTAI will participate to the evolution of the open-source real-time technology