An energy-aware framework for dynamic software management in mobile computing systems

Energy efficiency has become a very important and challenging issue for resource-constrained mobile computers. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic software management (DSOM) framework to improve battery utilization. We have designed and implemented a DSOM module in user space, independent of the operating system (OS), which explores quality-of-service (QoS) adaptation to reduce system energy and employs a priority-based preemption policy for multiple applications to avoid competition for limited energy resources. Software energy macromodels for mobile applications are employed to predict energy demand at each QoS level, so that the DSOM module is able to select the best possible trade-off between energy conservation and application QoS; it also honors the priority desired by the user. Our experimental results for some mobile applications (video player, speech recognizer, voice-over-IP) show that this approach can meet user-specified task-oriented goals and significantly improve battery utilization.