关键词:
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mobile computing Energy conservation
摘要:
Mobile computing is one of the largest untapped reservoirs in today's pervasive computing world as it has the potential to enable a variety of in-situ, real-time applications. However, the domain of mobile computing suffers from the constraints of limited resources such as device battery, CPU, and memory while at the same time users' expectations in terms of response times, accuracy, and data rates are increasing at a fast pace. As a result, achieving high energy efficiency while main- taining a high quality of service is a crucial challenge. Many of the mobile applications that are pervasive in our lives–such as localization, object/activity recognition, and mobile gaming to name a few–are expected to perform seamlessly with near-instantaneous responses, but are also affected by the same constraints. Current solutions based on offloading computationally-intensive applica- tions from resource-constrained mobile devices to powerful remote computing platforms (such as the Cloud) or nearby mobile devices, suffer from uncertainty in wireless network connectivity or availability of devices in proximity, respectively. To overcome the limitation of current works, the paradigm of approximate computing emerges as a solution to enable resource-intensive mobile applications in resource-constrained environment. Approximate computing reduces the amount of computation that an application is expected to per- form, as a result of which the execution time reduces, which in turn reduces the energy consumption of the application. The gain achieved via reduction in energy consumption, however, comes with a potential loss in the accuracy of the results (within acceptable limits). By leveraging approximate computing, we achieve dynamically a tradeoff between accuracy (or optimality of the results pro- duced by an application) and utilization of the available resources (such as battery, CPU cycles, memory, and I/O data rate). The goal of this thesis is to design new techniques so as to en