Event-Driven Resource Management on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Smartphones have become more powerful than ever that they can process complex tasks and handle heavy wireless data transmission. However, the increasing energy consumption caused by the increasing workload poses a challenge to the battery life, since the battery industry has not been able to develop as fast as mobile computing techniques. Hence, how to manage the resource consumption on mobile devices becomes an essential topic.

In this thesis we propose an event-driven framework for resource management on mobile devices. The idea is to use events to describe the changes in contexts and to control the consumption of resources based on events. Our framework adopts publish/subscribe mechanism, which allows applications and other software components such as power management software to subscribe to the events they are interested in.

We evaluate our framework with two power management applications: SNRbased transmission adaptation and tra_c-aware power management of Wi-Fi network interface. In the _rst case we manipulate the Wi-Fi network interface based on SNR value predictions. In the second case we modify the Wi-Fi network interface and TCP settings based on the TCP burst predictions. Our test results have veri_ed our target: with proper de_nition of the events rules, the resource is manipulated according to the adaptations and some energy is saved.