Energy efficiency and fairness tradeoffs in multi-resource, multi-tasking embedded systems

This paper presents techniques for optimizing the energy efficiency of multi-resource, multi-tasking embedded systems. Low power design of individual system resources, such as embedded processors, has been extensively studied in the past. However, system-level techniques, such as those presented in this paper, which exploit the synergy between various system resources, achieve levels of energy efficiency that cannot be obtained by considering individual resources independently. We demonstrate that, in multi-resource embedded systems that concurrently execute multiple applications, there exists a tradeoff between resource management efficiency and resource allocation fairness. By solving the multi-resource energy optimization problem in the context of an embedded sensor system, we show that our techniques enable the system designer to traverse this efficiency-fairness tradeoff space.