Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

We present strategies for "online" dynamic power management (DPM) based on the notion of the competitive ratio that allows us to compare the effectiveness of algorithms against an optimal strategy. This paper makes two contributions: it provides a theoretical basis for the analysis of DPM strategies for systems with multiple power down states: and provides a competitive algorithm based on probabilistically generated inputs that improves the competitive ratio over deterministic strategies. Experimental results show that our probability-based DPM strategy improves the efficiency of power management over the deterministic DPM strategy by 25%, bringing the strategy to within 23% of the optimal offline DPM.