Design and analysis of a low power wireless portable media player

For most portable media player (PMP), the demands for large storage space and longer working time usually can not be satisfied at the same time. In this paper, a low power wireless LAN based PMP called WiPMP is proposed. WiPMP is basically a diskless PMP. Instead, it can retrieve a large number of multimedia data from a remote storage device wirelessly. A prototype of WiPMP has been realized on an Intel Xscale embedded platform with embedded Linux as the operating system. A systematic power measurement and analysis method is used in this paper to evaluate the prototype from the perspective of power consumption. The result shows that WiPMP does consume less power and is able to access much more multimedia data than the hard disk based PMP.