Energy-Efficient Network Memory for Ubiquitous Devices

This paper explores the energy and delay issues that occur when some or all of the local storage is moved out of the embedded device, and into a remote network server. We demonstrate using the network to access remote storage in lieu of local DRAM results in significant power savings. Mobile applications continually demand additional memory, with traditional designs increasing DRAM to address this problem. Modern devices also incorporate low-power network links to support connected ubiquitous environments. Engineers then attempt to minimize utilization of the network due to its perceived large power consumption. This perception is misleading. For 1KB application “pages,” network memory is more power efficient than one 2MB DRAM part when the mean time between page transfers exceeds 0.69s. During each transfer the application delay to the user is only 16ms.