Energy and power management in smartphones - Using application intent to reduce energy consumption

Abstract

The exploding number and complexity of smartphone features and applications is rapidly adding to the computational requirements to implement them. Users demand better performance, more impressive interfaces and faster connections. This results in increasingly power-hungry devices to the point where energy and thermal constraints are becoming seriously limiting factors.

Battery technology, while providing steady but modest increases in energy density, cannot keep pace with the increasing power needs of smartphones. In order to satisfy the consumer demand for better battery life, it seems that the only escape is to improve the energy efficiency of smartphone platforms.

This thesis presents a software framework to exploit application intent to provide energy savings. The framework implements two basic techniques to control two of the most energy-hungry components in mobile devices: the display and network interface. The approach is then validated through an increasingly relevant scenario for smartphones, web browsing. The results indicate that the techniques proposed in this work can potentially provide slightly over 10% energy savings over the standard unmodified baseline software.