Center for Embedded Computer Systems University of California , Irvine Cross-Layer Interactions of Error Control Schemes in Mobile Multimedia Systems

Soft errors are threatening the system reliability in mobil e devices but traditional hardware protection techniques incur significant overheads in terms of power and performance. Thus, incorporating reliability in resource-limited mobile dev ices poses significant challenges. This paper discusses a cooperative method that exploits existin g error control schemes at an application layer to mitigate the impact of hardware defects such as soft errors for mobile multimedia systems. So we study heterogeneous specifics about two diffe rent errors at two different abstraction layers, and present a cooperative cross-layer approac h to obtain low-cost reliability at the minimal degradation of QoS. In particular, we propose a coop erative approach to combat soft errors at data caches by using dual schemes – a Drop and Forwar d Recovery and an errorresilient video encoding – driven by intelligent middlewar e schemes. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our cooperative error-aware method for a video encoding with different video streams improves performance by 60% and the energy consumpt ion by 58% with even better reliability at the cost of 3% quality degradation on average , as compared to an ECC-based hardware protection technique. Combining intelligent sch emes to select a recovery mechanism can guide system designers for trading off multiple constra in s such as performance, power, reliability, and QoS.