Transaction-based adaptive dynamic voltage scaling for interactive applications

摘要

In an interactive embedded system, special task execution patterns and scheduling constraints exist due to frequent human-computer interactions. This paper proposes a transaction-based dynamic voltage scaling (T-DVS) approach that takes into account the characteristics of interactive transactions. T-DVS scales CPU performance levels to reduce energy consumption, while satisfying the constraints of both human-perceptual threshold and CPU requirement of an interactive transaction. T-DVS considers CPU requirements of both interactive and background tasks during a user interaction. It exploits CPU idle time waiting for user responses to run background task with lower CPU frequency. Experiments demonstrate that T-DVS can reduce energy consumption significantly compared to state-of-the-art approaches, with little sacrifice in user-perceived performance.