A data discarding framework for reducing the energy consumption of Viterbi decoder in decoding broadcasted wireless multi-resolution JPEG2000 images

Resolution scalable compression and power efficient channel decoder design are the enabling techniques for multi-resolution wireless multimedia broadcasting. In this paper, we propose a data-discarding framework which controls the switching of the Viterbi decoder between active and sleep mode for decoding multi-resolution JPEG2000 images to significantly reduce the overall power consumption of the channel decoder. In particular, the Viterbi decoder is put into sleep mode to skip the decoding of the redundant higher resolution data according to the results of the source decoding. The proposed framework is independent of the underlying communication channel and the architecture of the Viterbi decoder. Hence, it can be applied on top of any existing low-power Viterbi decoders to further reduce the overall power consumption. Our results show that up to 75% power reduction is achieved when the source resolution, the target resolution, and the compression ratio are 1024×1024, 256×256, and 1 bit/pixel (bpp), respectively.