An application-aware approach to efficient power management in mobile devices

Reducing the energy consumed by mobile wireless devices to extend the lifetime of the batteries that power them is one of the major challenges in designing such systems. While this problem can be addressed at various levels (e.g. device, operating system, middleware, application), we think that it is possible to get a higher energy saving when considering the needs of the applications (application-aware). Our approach is centred on analyzing the behaviour of the applications more than the resources. In this paper, we present an application-aware framework which utilizes the needs of the applications and Dynamic Power Management (DPM) techniques focused on the wireless network card to control and reduce power consumption at runtime. We include a novel technique that increases the energy savings. We have also developed a simple prototype to test the viability of our idea. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves between 10% - 40% average reduction in the energy consumed by the wireless network interface.