Reliable low-power multimedia communication systems

Summary form only given. Next generation multimedia communications are characterized by increasing functionality, higher mobility and ubiquity of access. Advances in semiconductor technology has enabled the implementation of complex multimedia microsystems. However, this has also raised numerous challenges at the highest (system) and lowest (physical) levels of the design hierarchy for producing reliable and energy-efficient multimedia communication systems. Multimedia communication systems offer unique opportunities to address these problems due to the inherent redundancy in naturally occurring signals, the relaxed latency requirements, and the statistical nature of metrics, such as SNR, used commonly to quantify the functionality of such systems. Most importantly, in multimedia communication systems, algorithmic, architectural and circuit design issues are closely intertwined and better understood than in the case of general purpose computing. This raises the possibility of systematically optimizing energy and performance across the three domains. Two distinct design philosophies for implementing reliable and energy-efficient multimedia communication systems can be considered. The first approach, termed as noise-tolerance, is motivated from the communication and information-theoretic principle that energy-efficiency in the presence of noise is better achieved through error-control as opposed to noise control. The second approach relies on exploiting environmental dynamism, i.e., the inherent variability of environmental factors influencing the statistics of the multimedia signals being processed.