Considering power variations of DVS processing elements for energy minimisation in distributed systems

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a powerful technique to reduce power dissipation in embedded systems. In this paper we investigate the problem of considering DVS-processing element (DVS-PE) power variations dependent on the executed tasks, during the synthesis of distributed embedded systems, and its impact on the energy savings. Unlike previous approaches, which minimise the energy consumption by exploiting the available slack time without considering the PE power profiles, a new and fast heuristic for the voltage scaling problem is proposed, which improves the voltage selection for each task dependent on the individual power dissipation caused by that task. Experimental results show that energy reductions with up to 80.7% were achieved by integrating the proposed DVS algorithm, which considers the PE power profiles, into the co-synthesis of distributed systems.