User-aware Frame Rate Management in Android Smartphones

Abstract

Frame rate has a direct impact on the energy consumption of smartphones: the higher the frame rate, the higher the power consumption. Hence, reducing display refreshes will reduce the power consumption. However, it is risky to manipulate frame rate drastically as it can deteriorate user satisfaction with the device. In this work, we introduce a screen management system that controls the frame rate on smartphone displays based on a model that detects user dissatisfaction due to display refreshes. This approach is based on understanding when higher frame rates are necessary, and providing lower frame rates —thus, saving power— if the lower rate is predicted not to cause user dissatisfaction. According to the results of our first user survey with 20 participants, individuals show highly varying requirements: while some users require high frame rates for the highest satisfaction, others are equally satisfied with lower frame rates. Based on this observation, we develop a system that predicts user dissatisfaction on the runtime and either increases or decreases the maximum frame rate setting. For user dissatisfaction predictions, we have compared two different approaches: (1) static model, which uses dissatisfaction characteristics of a fixed group of people, and (2) user-specific model, which is learning only from the specific user. Our second set of experiments with 20 participants shows that users report 32% less dissatisfaction and 4% more dissatisfaction than the default Android system with user-specific and static systems, respectively. These experiments also show that, compared to the default scheme, our mechanisms reduce the power consumption of the phone by 7.2% and 1.8% on average with the user-specific and static models, respectively.