Contents provider-assisted dynamic voltage scaling for low energy multimedia applications

This paper presents a new concept of DVS (dynamic voltage scaling) for multimedia applications. Many multimedia applications have a periodic property, but each period shows a large variation in terms of its execution time. Exact estimation of such variation is a crucial factor for low energy software execution with DVS technique. Previous DVS techniques focused only on end users (client sites) and their quality heavily depends on the accuracy of the worst case execution time estimation. This paper proposes that contents providers (server sites) supply the information of the execution time variations in addition to the content itself. This makes it possible to perform DVS independent to worst case execution time estimation. The extra work required by the contents provider for this purpose is fully compensated by the benefits for the end users because single content is often provided to many users. Experimental results show that our method greatly reduces the energy consumption of client systems compared to previous DVS techniques.