Department of Computer Science

                     PURDUE UNIVERSITY

         Spring 2001 Tektronix Undergraduate Research Award

This project is supported by Tektronix from March 2001 to August 2001. It is also presented in the Undergraduate Research Day sponsored by the School of Science at Purdue University on April 7, 2001.

 

Proposal:
 

Within three years, the world-wide growth of handheld devices such as personal digital assistants is expected to outgrow notebook computers. Currently there are four major platforms of handheld PC in the market: Pocket PC, Palm, Symbian EPOC, and RIM Blackberry platforms with the majority of the handheld devices belong to Palm and Pocket PC platforms.

The Pocket PC uses an Intel-based processor which is typically more powerful than those used on the other forms. The Pocket PC also has a typically larger memory (16-32 MB).

Our research examines the following issues:

1.      Multimedia performance benchmarking

2.      Quality of service of the wireless internet device

3.      Battery energy consumption of applications

4.      Execution time of applications

5.      Memory access time and cache management

6.      Possible rooms for improvement in the system interface

We are also interested in comparisons between a desktop PC and a handheld device in terms of the functionality and performance. The methodology in this research will be to collect the performance data among various popular benchmark suites in the industry and then analyzing the data to draw the experimental result.  We will use primarily MediaBench , SPECint95, and Rabbit benchmark suites to perform the benchmarking process. Since MediaBench applications are relatively small in size, we will also measure the multimedia performance with other applications to prevent potential biased results.

We will first load a Linux operating system into the handheld device replacing the default operating system from manufacturer and then proceed with various benchmark suites for multimedia applications supporting standard widely used formats such as MPEG, JPEG, and MP3. The wireless internet connectivity (with WaveLAN wireless add-on) in the handheld devices will also be evaluated in terms of the quality of the connection and in conjunction with the streaming multimedia performance over the internet.

Eka will be working with the team in surveying the topic and performing the benchmarking process. From then on, we will analyze the benchmark data and implement possible improvements in the architecture of the system interface of the handheld device.