Evaluation of component-aware dynamic voltage scaling for mobile devices and wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is very important for mobile devices and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), because the consumable energy is limited. Therefore, the operating time of such devices depends mainly on the capacity of the energy storage component and on the average power consumption of the device. The power consumption depends on the supply voltage and on the activated components of the hardware. This work presents the evaluation of component-aware dynamic voltage scaling (CADVS). This low power technique combines the power-down of unused components and the minimization of the supply voltage. Typically, each component of the hardware (microcontroller, transceiver, sensors) has its own supply voltage range. Therefore, the minimum allowed supply voltage depends on the activated components. However, the activated components and consequently the minimum allowed supply voltage varies over time. CADVS uses voltage converter to adjusts the supply voltage of the hardware to save as much energy as possible. This work presents the evaluation of six different voltage converters. It has been shown that CADVS can be used to save up to 38.7% of the energy compared to a constant voltage supply using the introduced scenario while achieving the same end-user performance.