A Survey of Techniques For Improving Energy Efficiency in Embedded Computing Systems

Recent technological advances have greatly improved the performance and features of embedded systems. With the number of just mobile devices now reaching nearly equal to the population of earth, embedded systems have truly become ubiquitous. These trends, however, have also made the task of managing their power consumption extremely challenging. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we survey the techniques for managing power consumption of embedded systems. We discuss the need of power management and provide a classification of the techniques on several important parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application-developers in gaining insights into the working of power management techniques and designing even more efficient high-performance embedded systems of tomorrow

Energy efficiency with runtime models for energy-aware embedded systems.

Reducing power consumption is an important design objective in energy-constrained embedded and mobile systems. Such systems must be designed to meet functional and often timing requirements facing the challenge of energy restriction. This paper presents a new approach for power management based on ZETA, a mathematical framework that utilizes computational and energy models to provide proofs for optimal clock rate control. Special runtime models are developed to provide optimal values for the CPU clock rate under real-time requirements. The method is suitable for embedded systems which utilize a single task real-time computational model and linear energy models. A special tool called CASTLE is developed to support this approach. CASTLE helps us integrate power management into the operating system or to automatically insert power management into the application code. The tool utilizes as input application-specific data which is conveyed via comments in the source file