Low power and QoS

Abstract

Quality of service has recently emerged as one of the most important research topics and engineering problems in a number of fields, including the Internet, multimedia, and wireless communication. However, the interest in QoS in these fields has not been matched by similar interest among system designers. Therefore, a large and growing gap exists between theoretical discussions of QoS in the multimedia and networking literature and the practical application of QoS paradigms in system synthesis. At the same time, researchers have pursued many aspects of low-power designs and have proposed a variety of modeling and optimization techniques. Also, there are hundreds of research papers on, and dozens of tools for power minimization at essentially all stages of the design process. Nevertheless, no one has addressed the relationship between power optimization and QoS. Therefore, in the very near future we will likely see a flurry of research and development to realize design methodologies and synthesis tools that incorporate QoS methodologies and optimize system power consumption. To build a basis and provide an impetus for this research, I briefly survey the state-of-the-art QoS research and practice.