PARM: Power Aware Reconfigurable Middleware

In distributed environments, generic middleware services(e.g. caching, location management etc.) are widely used to satisfy application needs in a cost-effective manner. Such middleware services consume system resources such as storage, computation and communication and can be sources of significant power overheads when executed on low-power devices. We present a distributed middleware framework(parm), that is inherently power-aware and reconfigures itself to adapt to diminishing power levels of low-power devices. In this paper, we i) determine whether a reconfigurable component-based middleware framework can be utilized to achieve energy gains in low-power devices, while preserving the semantics of the middleware services, ii) present and evaluate a graph theoretic approach for dynamically determining middleware component reconfigurations and ascertaining the optimal frequency at which the restructuring should occur, for maximal energy gains at the device. We use extensive profiling to chart the energy usage patterns of middleware components and applications, and use the profiled data to drive our reconfiguration decisions. Our simulation results demonstrate that our framework is able to save 5% to 35% of energy depending on the nature and class of applications and middleware components used.