Cooperation in a Power-Aware Embedded-System Changing Environment: Public Goods Games With Variable Multiplication Factors

Power is becoming a critical constraint for designing embedded applications because the amount of power available to these portable systems is limited due to battery life. On the other hand, many of the emerging real-time applications designed for battery-operated systems, such as wireless communication, and audio and video processing, tend to compete in order to gain a larger fraction of the energy provided by the common (public) source. It is known that both cooperation and competition are very important for every vivid system operation and evolution because cooperation leads to the formation of more complex systems and competition is crucial for the efficient operation, especially when common sources are used. In this paper, we study the cooperation between individuals, i.e., power-aware jobs, of a group, i.e., an embedded system, in a power-aware changing environment, using a variation of the public goods game, in which the changing environment is modeled by a variable multiplication factor. Based on this PGG, we aim to find out what are the most essential conditions under which the cooperation between the power-aware jobs in periodically and abruptly power-aware changing environments of the embedded system is emerging and sustained. The most interesting result is that even in harsh situations, the jobs maintain a degree of cooperation to exploit favorable future energy changes in the power-aware environment.