EIMOS: Enhancing interactivity in mobile operating systems

Abstract

Interactivity is one of the most important factors in the computing systems. There has been a lot of research to improve the interactivity in traditional desktop environments. However, few research studies have been done for interactivity enhancement in mobile systems like smart phones and tablet PCs. Therefore, different approaches are required to improve the interactivity of these systems. Even if multiple processes are running in a mobile system, there is only one topmost process which interacts with the user due to the resource constraints like small screen sizes and limited input methods. In this paper, we propose EIMOS, a system which identifies the topmost process and enhances the interactivity. Our system improves the CPU process scheduler and I/O prefetcher in the mobile operating system. We also implement EIMOS in the Android mobile platform and performed several experiments. The experimental results show that the performance is increased up to 16% compared to that of the existing platform. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.