A resource-driven DVFS scheme for smart handheld devices

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of the emerging genre of smart handheld devices while simultaneously maintaining mobile applications and services is a major challenge. This work is inspired by an observation on the resource usage patterns of mobile applications. In contrast to existing DVFS scheduling algorithms and history-based prediction techniques, we propose a resource-driven DVFS scheme in which resource state machines are designed to model the resource usage patterns in an online fashion to guide DVFS. We have implemented the proposed scheme on Android smartphones and conducted experiments based on real-world applications. The results are very encouraging and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.