Power-Aware Resource Scheduling in Base Stations

Base band stations for Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication processing tend to rely on over-provisioned resources to ensure that peak demands can be met. These systems must meet user Quality of Service expectations, but during non-peak workloads, for instance, many of the cores could be placed in low-power modes. One key property of such application-specific systems is that they execute frequent, short-lived tasks. Sophisticated resource management and task scheduling approaches suffer intolerable overhead costs in terms of time and expense, and thus lighter-weight and more efficient strategies are essential to both saving power and meeting performance expectations. To this end, we develop a flexible, non-propietary LTE workload model to drive our resource management studies. Here we describe our experimental infrastructure and present early results that underscore the promise of our approach along with its implications on future hardware/software codesign.

I. Introduction

Power dissipation plays an increasingly important role in system design and specification of operational constraints. Power also influences the manufacturing cost of a system in terms of required cooling equipment. Furthermore, it has a direct impact on the operational cost. Balancing power efficiency with application performance requires intelligent resource management.