User-centered context-aware CPU/GPU power management for interactive applications on smartphones

Abstract

CPU/GPU frequency scheduling on smartphones that maintains users' quality of experience (QoE) while reducing power consumption has been studied extensively in the past. Most previous works focused on power-hungry applications such as video streaming or 3D games. However, the majority of people are light to medium users, using applications such as social networking, web browsing, etc. For such interactive applications, it is difficult to reduce power consumption, because their behaviors depend on the user's interactions and are hard to characterize. In this paper, we tackle this challenging problem by considering the influences of user contexts on their interaction behaviors. A context-aware CPU/GPU frequency scheduling governor is proposed that allocates CPU/GPU frequencies just enough to meet the workload under different stages of user interaction. Evaluations show that the proposed governor can save power consumption up to 25% compared to the default governor while keeping the users satisfied with the QoE.