Energy-efficient gaming on mobile devices using dead reckoning-based power management

Abstract

We address the issue of how to reduce energy consumption of the wireless interface during multiplayer gaming sessions on mobile devices. Reducing energy consumed by the wireless interface is achieved by putting it in a low-energy state when it is not used. We leverage the dead reckoning technique used in existing games. In dead reckoning, future locations of objects in a game are estimated based on their current locations and velocities. The difference between the extrapolated and true locations is known as the dead reckoning error. We propose an algorithm that employs the dead reckoning error rate to dynamically control the state of the wireless interface. We implement our algorithm into a dead reckoning simulator that is based on a real open-source game. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 36% energy savings for mobile devices. Our proposed algorithm is practical because it does not require much additional code and it allows easy integration with existing games.