Dynamic power management for streaming data

This paper presents a method that uses data buffers to smoothen request variations and to create long idleness for power management. This method considers the power consumed by the buffers and assigns an energy penalty for buffer underflow. Our approach provides analytic formulas for calculating the optimal buffer sizes and the amount of data to store in the buffers. We use video prefetching as a case study and obtain power savings of more than 74% for MPEG-1 and 34% for MPEG-2 videos.