Energy-aware keyword search on mobile phones

With the explosive growth of communication technologies, modern mobile phones become more powerful than ever. Unfortunately, the battery lifetime of mobile phones is still limited, and energy awareness is a priority of designing applications on mobile phones. To demonstrate the energy awareness on mobile phones, we propose a new approach for full-text keyword searches to retrieve content matching input keywords. The proposed approach generalizes the two solutions that answer the keyword searches either (i) locally by mobile phones themselves or (ii) remotely by power servers when the keywords are offloaded to such servers. Instead, for low energy, we propose to split the keywords in a search into two subsets, such that one subset is processed by the mobile phone and another by the remote server. Our preliminary experiment results indicate the hybrid approach can save the most energy for the keyword searches than the local and remote approaches. In our example tests, energy of the hybrid approach saves 75% and 47% of energy when compared to local execution and complete offloading approaches, respectively.