Mitigating the Impact of Hardware Failures on Multimedia Applications – A Cross-Layer Approach

Incorporating reliability in resource-limited mobile devices poses significant challenges due to the high overheads of power and performance. Using the observation that error-awareness at one abstraction layer can be exploited to enhance end-to-end reliability at other abstraction layers, this paper proposes a cross-layer method exploiting error control schemes across layers. In particular, a cross-layer approach is presented to combat hardware defects at minimal costs of power and performance by using error control schemes in multimedia applications. We propose a cross-layer, error-aware method that exploits dual approach – a Drop and Forward Recovery (DFR) and an error-resilient video encoding – driven by intelligent middleware schemes for mitigating the impact of soft errors. Our cross-layer approach enables exploration of feasible solutions satisfying maximal reliability with minimal overheads of power and performance, and additionally opens up a new design space yielding solutions that can tradeoff QoS for reliability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our cross-layer, error-aware method for a video encoding with video sequences improves performance by 60% and the energy consumption by 58% with even better reliability at the cost of 3% quality degradation on average, as compared to an ECC-based hardware protection technique .