A Comparative Study of Dynamic Voltage Scaling Techniques for Low-Power Video Decoding
Eriko Nurvitadhi, Ben Lee, Chansu Yu, Myungchul Kim · 2003
This paper presents a comparison of power-aware video decoding techniques that utilize Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) capability. Three techniques were simulated and compared in terms of power consumption, accuracy, and deadline misses. The simulation results show that the dynamic per-frame technique, where the decoding time prediction adapts to the particular video being decoded, is the most promising approach due to its feasibility of implementation and comparable performance to the ideal case. Our findings also indicate that in general, as the number of available processor settings increases, the amount of power saving increases, but the number of deadline misses increases as well. More importantly, most of these deadline misses are within 10-20% of the playout interval and thus insignificant. However, video clips with high variability in frame complexities combined with inaccurate decoding time predictions may degrade the video quality. Finally, our results show that a processor with 13 voltage/frequency settings is sufficient to achieve near maximum performance with the experimental environment and the video workloads we have used.