Energy-aware design patterns for mobile application development (invited talk)

Developing energy-efficient application is crucial for mobile platforms such as smartphone and tablets, since such devices operate on a limited amount of battery power. However, until recently most of the smartphone applications have been developed in an energy-oblivious fashion. This is increasingly becoming a concern due to the fact that smartphone applications are progressively becoming complex and energy-intensive, whereas the battery technology is unable to keep up. Existing studies have proposed a number of testing and re-factoring techniques that can be used to increase the energy-efficiency of such applications, after the development has been completed. However, we feel that maximum level of energy-efficiency can be achieved only if energy-efficient design practices are used in the software development process. In this study, we propose a set of energy-aware design patterns, specifically targeted at smartphone applications. These design patterns can be applied to huge number of real-life scenarios for energy-efficient information gathering and processing, within the smartphone application. We also present some examples of design patterns for application development for the Android platform.