Power Clocks: Dynamic Multi-Clock Management for Embedded Systems

This paper presents Power Clocks, a kernel-based dynamic clock management system that reduces active energy use in embedded microcontrollers by changing the clock based on ongoing computation and I/O requests. In Power Clocks, kernel hardware drivers asynchronously request clocks, providing a set of constraints (e.g., maximum speed), which the kernel uses to dynamically choose the most efficient clock. To select a clock, Power Clocks makes use of the observation that though slower clocks use less power and are suited for fixed time I/O operations, faster clocks use less energy per clock tick, making them optimal for pure computation. Using Power Clocks, a networked sensing application consumes 27% less energy than the best static clock, and within 3% of an optimal hand-tuned dynamic clock strategy. Power Clocks provides similar energy savings even when there are multiple applications.