Playback of Multimedia Data in Low Power Mobile Drive

摘要

In this paper, we present the novel scheduling algorithm of the multimedia data retrieval for the mobile disk drive. Our algorithm is focused on minimizing the power consumption in multimedia data retrieval. While the disk based storage devices, e.g. hard disk and optical disk becomes small enough to be used in mobile devices, the practical usage of which leaves much to be desired due to the stringent power consumption restriction of the mobile device. The playback of multimedia data requires that data blocks are delivered to the destination in periodic fashion. The major issue here has been how to guarantee the continuous flow of data. Most of preceding works assume that the disk drive always operates in the steady state. However, this does not hold in modern disk drive for the mobile device. Modern low power disk drive for mobile device goes into standby state when it is not in use. While this feature can significantly extend the battery life, it adds another dimension of complexity in scheduling of the multimedia data retrieval. We elaborately model the power consumption behavior of the low power mobile drive and develop an Adaptive Round Merge(ARM) scheduling algorithm which guarantees a certain disk bandwidth for the multimedia playback while minimizing the power consumption of the storage device. According to our simulation based experiment, the ARM algorithm reduces the power consumption by as much as 23%. It manifests itself when the video clip is relatively short, typically less than 30 sec.