  The goal of this work is to minimize the energy dissipation of embedded
controllers without jeopardizing the quality of control (QoC). Taking advantage
of the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technology, this paper develops a
performance-aware power management scheme for embedded controllers with
processors that allow multiple voltage levels. The periods of control tasks are
adapted online with respect to the current QoC, thus facilitating additional
energy reduction over standard DVS. To avoid the waste of CPU resources as a
result of the discrete voltage levels, a resource reclaiming mechanism is
employed to maximize the CPU utilization and also to improve the QoC.
Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.
Compared with the optimal standard DVS scheme, the proposed scheme is shown to
be able to save remarkably more energy while maintaining comparable QoC.
