In recent years, consumer electronic devices have been expanding their application domains from traditional consumer electronic devices such as cellular phones, PDAs(Personal Digital Assistants), PMPs(Portable Multimedia Players), Navigation, to Next Generation Personal Computers(NGPCs) such as eating consumer electronic devices, implanted consumer electronic devices, wearable consumer electronic devices. A wearable consumer electronic device is a computer that is subsumed into the personal space of the user, controlled by the user, and is always on and always accessible. Therefore, among the most salient aspect of wearable consumer electronic devices should be small form factor and long battery lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel low-power real-time operating system (RTOS) specialized for the ARC(Actual Remote Control). An ARC is a wearable wristwatch-type remote controller; it also can serve as a universal remote control for various consumer electronic devices. The proposed RTOS has about 9KB footprints and is equipped with low-power techniques composed of the dynamic power management and the device power management. Experimental results with wearable application show that we can save energy up to 47 % using the proposed low-power techniques.

The ubiquitous flexible operating system (UbiFOS) is a real-time operating system designed for cost-conscious, low-power, small to medium-sized embedded systems such as cellular phones, MP3 players, and wearable computers. It offers efficient real-time operating system services like multi-task scheduling, memory management, inter-task communication and synchronization, and timers while keeping the kernel size to just a few to tens of kilobytes. For flexibility, UbiFOS uses various task scheduling policies such as cyclic time-slice (round-robin), priority-based preemption with round-robin, priority-based preemptive, and bitmap. When there are less than 64 tasks, bitmap scheduling is the best policy. The scheduling overhead is under 9 µs on the ARM926EJ processor. UbiFOS also provides the flexibility for user to select from several inter-task communication techniques according to their applications. We ported UbiFOS on the ARM9-based DVD player (20 kB), the Calm16-based MP3 player (under 7 kB), and the ATmega128-based ubiquitous sensor node (under 6 kB). Also, we adopted the dynamic power management (DPM) scheme. Comparative experimental results show that UbiFOS could save energy up to 30% using DPM.

In hard real-time task systems where periodic and aperiodic tasks coexist, the object of task scheduling is to reduce the response time of the aperiodic tasks while meeting the deadline of periodic tasks. Total bandwidth server (TBS) and advanced TBS (ATBS) are used in dynamic priority systems. However, these methods are not optimal solutions because they use the worst-case execution time (WCET) or the estimation value of the actual execution time of the aperiodic tasks. This paper presents an online slack-stealing algorithm called SSML that can make significant response time reducing by modification of look-ahead earliest deadline first (laEDF) algorithm as the slack computation method. While the conventional slack-stealing method has a disadvantage that the slack amount of each frame must be calculated in advance, SSML calculates the slack when aperiodic tasks arrive. Our simulation results show that SSML outperforms the existing TBS based algorithms when the periodic task utilization is higher than 60%. Compared to ATBS with virtual release advancing (VRA), the proposed algorithm can reduce the response time up to about 75%. The performance advantage becomes much larger as the utilization increases. Moreover, it shows a small performance variation of response time for various task environments.