Optimal buffer management using hybrid systems

This paper studies a class of dynamic buffer management problems with one buffer inserted between two interacting components. The overall system is modeled as a hybrid system and the power minimization problem is formulated as an optimal control problem. Different from many previous studies, the objective function of the proposed problem depends on the switching cost and the size of the continuous state space, making its solution much more challenging. A simplified version of the problem with some extra assumptions is solved. This paper relaxes all these assumptions and gives a complete solution to the proposed problem using some variational approach. Simulation result shows that the proposed method can save about 60% energies compared with some heuristic schemes.