Dynamic hardware management of the H264/AVC encoder control structure using a framework for system scenarios

Many modern applications exhibit dynamic behavior, which can be exploited for reduced energy consumption. We employ a two-phase combined design-time/run-time methodology that identifies different run-time situations and clusters similar behaviors into system scenarios. This methodology is integrated with our framework for system scenario based designs, which dynamically tune the hardware to match the application behavior. We achieve significant energy reductions for an extracted control structure of a video codec widely used in hand-held devices today. We encode a video stream consisting of different frame sizes based on measured available wireless bandwidth. Energy consumption is measured with a modified microcontroller board from Atmel with two alternative voltage and frequency settings. While maintaining the perceptual video quality and frame rate, our method results in up to 44% energy reduction for our encoded streams, even after including an average worst-case tuning overhead of 8.5%. In reality this overhead is typically negligible since the worst-case assumes very frequent tuning, while in realistic situations it will be performed at a much lower rate. This makes the expected gain over 50%.