• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.1423-1435
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• 2010

Building wireless sensor networks requires a constituting sensor node to consider the following limited hardware resources: a small battery lifetime limiting available power supply for the sensor node, a low-power microprocessor with a low-performance computing capability, and scarce memory resources. Despite such limited hardware resources of the sensor node, the sensor node platform needs to activate real-time sensing, guarantee the real-time processing of sensing data, and exchange data between individual sensor nodes concurrently. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an energy-efficient real-time task scheduling technique for battery-powered wireless sensor nodes. The proposed energy-efficient task scheduling technique controls the microprocessor's operating frequency and reduces the power consumption of a task by exploiting the slack time of the task when the actual execution time of the task can be less than its worst case execution time. The outcomes from experiments showed that the proposed scheduling technique yielded efficient performance in terms of guaranteeing the completion of real-time tasks within their deadlines and aiming to provide low power consumption.