ITR: Collaborative Hardware-Software Adaptation for Multimedia Applications

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile systems primarily processing multimedia data are expected to become a dominant computing platform for many application domains. The design of such systems imposes several new challenges, as it must consider demanding, dynamic, and multidimensional resource requirements and constraints, with energy becoming a first-class resource. At the same time, the ability of multimedia applications to trade off output quality for system resources and the difference between their peak and average demands offers a huge opportunity for optimization. A promising approach to meet the challenges of mobile multimedia systems, therefore, is to design all system layers with an ability to adapt in response to system or application changes. Further, to reap the full benefits of these adaptations, all system layers must cooperate to reach a system-wide globally-optimal configuration. This research seeks to develop and demonstrate an integrated cross-layer adaptive system where hardware and all software layers cooperatively adapt to changing system resources and application demands, seeking to maximize user satisfaction while meeting resource constraints of energy, time, and bandwidth. This work is expected to have a large impact because it will expose sources of substantial performance improvement not available before, for a platform of increasing importance to many application domains.