Considering Power Variations of DVS Processing Elements for Energy Minimisation in Distributed Systems

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Description/Abstract

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a powerful technique to reduce power dissipation in embedded systems. Previous research in distributed system synthesis has assumed that the power consumption of DVS processing elements (PEs) is constant, independent of the executed tasks. In this paper we investigate the problem of considering DVS PE power variations dependent on tasks, during the synthesis of distributed embedded systems and its impact on the energy savings. Unlike previous approaches which consider a constant power dissipation of PEs, a new and fast heuristic for the voltage scaling problem is proposed, which improves the voltage selection for each task dependent on the individual power dissipation caused by that task. Experimental results show that energy reductions of up to 74% are achieved by identifying improved scaling voltages for each task during co-synthesis of the distributed system, using the proposed DVS algorithm.