Systematic dynamic memory management design methodology for reduced memory footprint

Abstract

New portable consumer embedded devices must execute multimedia and wireless network applications that demand extensive memory footprint. Moreover, they must heavily rely on Dynamic Memory (DM) due to the unpredictability of the input data (e.g., 3D streams features) and system behavior (e.g., number of applications running concurrently defined by the user). Within this context, consistent design methodologies that can tackle efficiently the complex DM behavior of these multimedia and network applications are in great need. In this article, we present a new methodology that allows to design custom DM management mechanisms with a reduced memory footprint for such kind of dynamic applications. First, our methodology describes the large design space of DM management decisions for multimedia and wireless network applications. Then, we propose a suitable way to traverse the aforementioned design space and construct custom DM managers that minimize the DM used by these highly dynamic applications. As a result, our methodology achieves improvements of memory footprint by 60% on average in real case studies over the current state-of-the-art DM managers used for these types of dynamic applications.