Low-Power Architectures for Mobile Systems

7.4 Concluding remarks

The starting point for the activities in MAIS concerning hardware architectures might be summarized as follows: extract the most relevant and characteristic requirements on and challenges to the hardware architecture presented by the MAIS applications, and perform an exploration of the architectural design space (at the level of both the individual processing nodes in a network and of the network itself) so as to optimize some particularly relevant figure of merit. Specifically, we have taken performance, power consumption, and robustness of security-oriented modules into account. This allowed us to propose flexible solutions for CPU architectures, whose configuration could be exploited best at run time by the intrinsic characteristics of the applications, and to derive power models and frameworks, both at CPU and at protocol level so as to model and subsequently optimize power consumption locally and at network level. Security was analyzed from, in particular the standpoint of side channel attacks, exploring DFA attacks and examining the effectiveness and cost of some proposed countermeasures.