Processor frequency setting for energy minimization of streaming multimedia application

In this paper, we describe a software-controlled approach for adaptively minimizing energy in embedded systems for real-time multimedia processing. Energy is optimized by clock speed setting: the software controller dynamically adjusts processor clock speed to the frame rate requirements of the incoming multimedia stream. The speed-setting policy is based on a system model that correlates clock speed with best-case, average-case and worst-case sustainable frame rate, accounting for data-dependency in multimedia streams. Experiments on an MP3 decoding application show that computational energy can be drastically reduced with respect to fixed-frequency operation.