Real-time programming considers timing as part of the correctness of a program. By analogy, we define "Real-Energy" programming.
Real-time programming exists, in the sense that there are languages, compiler optimizations, implementation methods and execution environments that are specifically designed to meet timing requirements. Real-energy programming does not exist, yet.
The group has started to work on the implementations methods that can be defined for a global managing of energy consumption between the embedded software and the various device drivers in the nodes of a sensor network. Existing work in systems like TinyOS allow for a quite ad-hoc managing of energy consumption, in the driver of each hardware element. When a global policy has to be implemented, the global state of the hardware elements has to be taken into account, but this is done in a per-case basis. In fact, some of the global optimizations problems can be formulated as a controller synthesis problem. Moreover, in other application domains like systems-on-a-chip for multimedia applications, people have developed solutions based on the notion of a power manager component. Our approach will be to adopt the idea of power managers, and to try and generate them from the specifications of energy policies, by techniques similar to controller synthesis.
The first result on this subject is published in LCTES 2011.
