Power-Aware Middleware for Mobile Applications

Abstract

This chapter develops a middleware based approach to optimizing the power consumption of low-power mobile devices executing rich applications such as multimedia streaming and location based services. In mobile distributed environments, generic middleware services (e.g. caching, location management etc.) are widely used to satisfy application Quality-of-Service (QoS) needs in a cost effective manner. Such middleware services consume system resources such as storage, computation and communication and can be sources of significant power overheads when executed on low-power devices. In particular, we develop techniques for partitioning tasks to realize mobile applications into reconfigurable components; we also advocate a proxy based approach wherein components can be dynamically stopped or migrated away from a low-power device to an in-network proxy node, thereby extending the life time of the device. Specifically, 1)determine whether a reconfigurable component-based middleware framework can be utilized to achieve energy gains on low-power devices in distributed environments and 2) design and evaluate techniques for dynamically determining middleware component reconfigurations, and ascertaining the optimal frequency at which the restructuring should take place, for maximal energy and service time gains at the device. As the case study we will introduce a power-aware middleware framework (PARM) and identify some of the intrinsic requirements for the framework to be effective.