Design and Implementation of an Energy Efficient Multimedia Playback System

Mobile devices capable of multimedia playback have become popular consumer items, making techniques for energy management during multimedia decoding increasingly important. In this paper, we model the multimedia decoding process as a discrete-time system excited by random input sequences representing the incoming stream and therefore, unlike many existing techniques, do not make any assumptions about the workload streams. Using this novel stochastic process model, we can apply formal methods to analyze the decoding system and design a feedback-based on-line dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVS) algorithm to effectively reduce the energy consumption during multimedia playback. We implemented our technique in a laptop computer equipped with a DVS enabled processor, and results reveal good performance for real-world video clips across a wide range of video compression formats compared with existing techniques.