Probabilistic design of multimedia embedded systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the novel concept of probabilistic design for multimedia embedded systems, which is motivated by the challenge of how to design, but not overdesign, such systems while systematically incorporating performance requirements of multimedia application, uncertainties in execution time, and tolerance for reasonable execution failures. Unlike most present techniques that are based on either worst- or average-case execution times of application tasks, where the former guarantees the completion of each execution, but often leads to overdesigned systems, and the latter fails to provide any completion guarantees, the proposed probabilistic design method takes advantage of unique features mentioned above of multimedia systems to relax the rigid hardware requirements for software implementation and avoid overdesigning the system. In essence, this relaxation expands the design space and we further develop an off-line on-line minimum effort algorithm for quick exploration of the enlarged design space at early design stages. This is the first step toward our goal of bridging the gap between real-time analysis and embedded software implementation for rapid and economic multimedia system design. It is our belief that the proposed method has great potential in reducing system resource while meeting performance requirements. The experimental results confirm this as we achieve significant saving in system's energy consumption to provide a statistical completion ratio guarantee (i.e., the expected number of completions over a large number of iterations is greater than a given value).