BLAST: Battery lifetime-constrained adaptation with selected target in mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices today contain many power hungry subsystems and execute different applications. Standard power management is not aware of the desired battery lifetime and has no visibility into which applications are executing. However, power consumption is strongly dependent on which applications are executed. In this work, we propose a novel power characterization strategy for mobile devices called application-dependent power states (AP-states). Based on that, we formulate a management problem to improve performance under battery lifetime constraints, and we implement the management framework on a real Android device. We call our framework BLAST: Battery Lifetime-constrained Adaptation with Selected Target. The goal of such framework is to maximize performance while letting the device battery to last at least for a certain required lifetime, and only requires the user to select the desired target lifetime. The implementation does not require OS modifications and can be ported and installed to any Android device. We experimentally verify that our strategy can still meets user experience requirements with a selected target battery lifetime extension of at least 25%.