Power Minimization under QoS Constraints

Abstract

QoS has been often addressed in multimedia, video, and networking research communities,but rarely in the design community. Our goal is to introduce the rst system design techniquefor comprehensive quality-of-service (QoS) low power synthesis. Specically, we study how toeciently exploit the trade-o between the system cost and energy consumption in real-timesystems that address packet-based multimedia transmission and processing. We rst introducea system of techniques that minimizes energy consumption of stream-oriented applicationsunder two main QoS metrics: latency and synchronization. Specically, we study howmultiplevoltages can be used to simultaneously satisfy hardware requirements and minimize powerconsumption, while preserving the requested level of QoS, in this case satisfying latency andsynchronization requirements.We have developed a provably optimal polynomial time o-line algorithm for multiple volt-age scheduling of single and multiple processes. The o-line algorithm provides lower boundson achievable power minimization and can be used as a starting point for the developmentand evaluation of an on-line approach. The eectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated ona number of multimedia benchmarks.