Pasa: a Software Architecture for Building Power Aware Embedded Systems

We present here a software architecture and an API that enables application developer to explore and build power / performance tradeoffs in the application software and enable the operating system to make appropriate hardware adjustments guided by application and system dynamic power management policies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation by implementing power aware scheduling schemes within eCos embedded real time operating system using real tasksets. We also present a battery driven adaptation scheme implemented in a wavelet based image compression application. The resuls show the usefulness of PASA (Power Aware Software Architecture) in power / performance tradeoffs and in comparison of power management policies in a real system implementation.