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Low power techniques for an android based phone

Published: 31 August 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Android is the latest trend in mobile operating systems. Even though Android provides a complete set of application, middleware and Linux kernel for the phone applications developer, it does not fully utilize several standard kernel features. This work attempts to address the limitations of Android specific to power management at kernel level and proposes possible solutions for active and static power management in Linux to overcome these limitations. The developed solutions for active power management include selection of suitable governor algorithm and modification of its parameters and implementation of a daemon process, which performs voltage and frequency scaling. Application level low power techniques for Android are also proposed to help application developers to optimize their software. The objectives of the work are realized by designing and implementing low power techniques for OMAP3530 based Beagleboard. The functionality of the implemented low power techniques is verified through several test cases using benchmarking applications such as 2D/3D rendering, playing a movie file and decompressing. The test execution results are presented in terms of performance, execution time, total current consumed, standby time and battery life. From these tests, it is concluded that through low power techniques it is possible to achieve up to 29% increase in battery life and up to 117% increase in standby time at no or very little performance degradation.

References

[1]
Kihwan Choi, Ramakrishna Soma, Massoud Pedram (2004), "Fine-Grained Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling for Precise Energy and Performance Trade-Off Based on the Ratio of Off-Chip Access to On-Chip Computation Times", In Proceedings of The Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe, Vol. 1, pp. 10016.
[2]
Jeff Sharkey (2009), "Coding for Life--Battery Life, That Is", http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/CodingLifeBatteryLife.html.
[3]
Venkatesh Pallipadi and Alexey Starikovskiy (2006), "The ondemand Governor: Past, Present and Future", In Proceedings of Linux Symposium, Vol.2, pp.223--238.
[4]
OMAP35x Applications Processor Technical Reference Manual, Literature Number SPRUF98D, Texas Instruments, http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/omap3525.
[5]
www.beagleboard.org/uploads/BBSRM_B5.pdf.
[6]
http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/development/pdk/docs/system_requirements.html.
[7]
http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/development/pdk/docs/power_management.html.
[8]
Mauro Marinoni, Giorgio Buttazzo (2006), Balancing Energy vs. Performance in Processors with Discrete Voltage/Frequency Modes, In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 294--304.
[9]
Joo-Young Hwang, Sang-Bum Suh (2008), Woo-Bok Yi, Jun-Hee Kim, Ji-Hong Kim, Low Power MPEG4 Player, In the Proceedings of Linux Symposium Linux Symposium, Vol.1, pp. 219--228.
[10]
Linux_2.6.32_source/ Documentation/cpu-freq/governors.txt.
[11]
http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/CELF_Specification_V_1_0_R2?action=print.
[12]
Welcome to Android, http://source.android.com/download.
[13]
OMAP Power Management, http://elinux.org/OMAP_Power_Management.

Cited By

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  • (2014)Phone2CloudInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-013-9458-116:1(95-111)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
  • (2013)An application-level energy-efficient scheduling for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling2013 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)10.1109/ICCE.2013.6486770(3-6)Online publication date: Jan-2013
  • (2013)PhoneJouleProceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications and IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing10.1109/GreenCom-iThings-CPSCom.2013.374(1996-2001)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2013

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News  Volume 39, Issue 2
May 2011
52 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/2024716
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 August 2011
Published in SIGARCH Volume 39, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Linux kernel
  2. android
  3. beagleboard
  4. dynamic voltage and frequency scaling
  5. open multimedia application processor
  6. optimization
  7. power management

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Cited By

View all
  • (2014)Phone2CloudInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-013-9458-116:1(95-111)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
  • (2013)An application-level energy-efficient scheduling for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling2013 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)10.1109/ICCE.2013.6486770(3-6)Online publication date: Jan-2013
  • (2013)PhoneJouleProceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications and IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing10.1109/GreenCom-iThings-CPSCom.2013.374(1996-2001)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2013

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