Energy efficient video decoding for the Android operating system

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is an effective technique for reducing power consumption. Due to the increasing popularity of multimedia applications for portable consumer electronic devices, the importance on reducing their power consumption becomes significant. This paper proposed a table-based DVFS mechanism for frame decoding that reduces the power consumption of a processor by exploiting the frame decoding complexity. A table-based DVFS predictor is used in the frame decoding prediction. This study was implemented in the Android operating system on an Intel PXA27x embedded platform. Experiment results showed that the energy consumption of decoding videos can be reduced from 9% to 17%, whereas the frame drop-rate is less than 3%.