User-Centric Scheduling and Governing on Mobile Devices with big.LITTLE Processors

Abstract

Mobile applications will become progressively more complicated and diverse. Heterogeneous computing architectures like big.LITTLE are a hardware solution that allows mobile devices to combine computing performance and energy efficiency. However, software solutions that conform to the paradigm of conventional fair scheduling and governing are not applicable to mobile systems, thereby degrading user experience or reducing energy efficiency. In this article, we exploit the concept of application sensitivity, which reflects the user’s attention on each application, and devise a user-centric scheduler and governor that allocate computing resources to applications according to their sensitivity. Furthermore, we integrate our design into the Android operating system. The results of experiments conducted on a commercial big.LITTLE smartphone with real-world mobile apps demonstrate that the proposed design can achieve significant gains in energy efficiency while improving the quality of user experience.