Pushing down user information to enhance smart device system design

Recent popularity in smart devices, for example smartphones, has created an increased interest in carrying small devices with limited battery capacity. Unfortunately, smartphones are notorious for consuming energy far too quickly. Although certain advances have been made on the hardware side such as better batteries, this talk is focused on improving energy management software in the lower layer system to make better use of existing batteries. For modern smartphone, a major cause of battery drain is wireless communications. Most smartphones come equipped with multiple radio transceivers, such as Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi and 4G, among which power hungry WiFi or 4G radios are required for access to the Internet. The frequency of use of these radios is spurred by the popularity of smartphone applications, and many applications require the phone to be constantly connected to the Internet. The wide availability of applications, for instance the Android Market has over 700K registered applications, shows that the need to save smartphone radio energy is highly relevant and urgent today.