Event-driven power management of portable systems

The policy optimization problem for dynamic power management has received considerable attention in the recent past. We formulate policy optimization as a constrained optimization problem on continuous-time SemiMarkov decision processes (SMDP). SMDPs generalize the stochastic optimization approach based on discrete-time Markov decision processes (DTMDP) presented in the earlier work by relaxing two limiting assumptions. In SMDPs, decisions are made at each event occurrence instead of at each discrete time interval as in DTMDP, thus saving power and giving higher performance. In addition, SMDPs can have general inter-state transition time distributions, allowing for greater generality and accuracy in modeling reallife systems where transition times between power states are not geometrically distributed. 1 Introduction Dynamic power management is a widely-employed lowpower design technique. Dynamic power management efficiently exploits system resources by controlling their mode of oper...