A DVFS scheme for Embedded Systems with Human Interaction

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) schemes have shown to be effective in reducing the energy requirements of hand held devices such as smartphones. Current system-wide DVFS schemes act upon statistics of historical performance measures. As a result these schemes react after certain events have manifested. Being proactive to these events may yield more energy and performance gains. We propose a DVFS scheme that bases its decisions on the human interaction with the device. The advantage of such approach is that the system’s reactivity is following the computational load on the system better and energy is used more effectively. Our simulations show that such an interactive DVFS scheme is most effective for applications that incur low computational load on the system and interact with user often.