Systems engineering approach to CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia systems

In the ever-increasing digital world, mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers are on the trend to become the most used electronic devices. Multimedia applications running on these devices require appropriate operating system support. These types of applications are often characterized as soft real-time applications since missing deadlines is not critical, even the quality of service decreases. One limitation of the capabilities of these devices comes from their power source: they are all battery-powered, with a restricted battery energy budget. An important part of the total power is used by the CPU of these devices, so by controlling the power consumed by the CPU, the overall power used by the mobile device will be significantly reduced. This work proposes a systems engineering modeling approach that integrates soft-real time CPU scheduling methodologies with dynamic voltage scaling approaches with the objective of achieving energy savings while providing a high-quality level of service.