Dynamic voltage scaling and power management for portable systems

Portable systems require long battery lifetime while still delivering high performance. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) algorithms reduce energy consumption by changing processor speed and voltage at run time depending on the needs of the applications running. Dynamic power management (DPM) policies trade off the performance for the power consumption by selectively placing components into low-power states. In this work we extend the DPM model with a DVS algorithm, thus enabling larger power savings. We test our approach on MPEG video and MP3 audio algorithms running on the SmartBadge portable device. Our results show savings of a factor of three in energy consumption for combined DVS and DPM approaches.