Reducing memory accesses with a system-level design methodology in customized dynamic memory management

Abstract

Currently, portable consumer embedded devices are increasing more and more their capabilities and can now implement new algorithms (e.g. multimedia and wireless protocols) that a few years ago were reserved only for powerful workstations. Unfortunately, the original design characteristics of such applications do not often allow to port them directly in current embedded devices. These applications share complex and intensive memory use. Furthermore, they must heavily rely on dynamic memory due to the unpredictability of the input data (e.g. 3D streams features) and system behaviour (e.g. number of applications running concurrently defined by the user). Thus they require that the dynamic memory subsystem involved is able to provide the necessary level of performance for these new dynamic applications. However, actual embedded systems have very limited resources (e.g. speed and power consumed in the memory subsystem) to provide efficient general-purpose dynamic memory management. We propose a new methodology to design custom dynamic memory managers that provide the performance required in new embedded devices by reducing the amount of memory accesses to handle these new dynamic multimedia and wireless network applications. Our results in real-life dynamic applications show significant improvements in memory accesses of dynamic memory managers, i.e. up to 58%, compared to state-of-the-art dynamic memory management solutions for complex applications.