Consumption analysis and estimation in the design of GStreamer based multimedia applications

Multimedia application development on embedded systems requires highly sophisticated hardware/software frameworks. These frameworks make heavy use of available hardware resources and therefore the impact on the overall consumption is far from negligible. Being able to determine this impact is therefore essential. In order to tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a methodology for modeling the power and energy consumption of multimedia applications, which allows a rapid performance analysis of combined signal and image processing on complex embedded systems. This methodology is applied to the GStreamer multimedia framework running on Linux operating system for the OMAP3530 heterogeneous MPSoC. Our approach is based on measurements of the power consumption during the rendering of compressed audio/video streams. Resulting power models consider features of the source stream such as the duration, video resolution, audio sampling frequency and bitrate. The precision of our models is presented and finally compared to the actual measurements for two full multimedia clips.