CPM: A Cross-Layer Framework to Efficiently Support Distributed Resources Management

Resource management, and especially power management, is a key aspect for the success of modern battery supplied multimedia devices. This class of devices are usually based on SoCs with a wide range of heterogeneous subsystems, competing for shared resources while offering several power control mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms require suitable software support to be exploited effectively. Unfortunately, real commercial systems focusing on mobile multimedia exposes a software layer composed by a collection of fairly independent local optimization policies, each focusing on a specific device or subsystem. This paper presents CPM, a cross-layer model and framework to support system wide resource management. The main goals of this framework are to efficiently support the aggregation of applications' QoS requirements and to provide a dynamic, system-wide, and multi-objective optimization to coordinate devices' local policies. A real solution, which is well integrated within the existing Linux kernels, has been developed and evaluated to asses its negligible overhead.