Middleware for efficient power management in mobile devices

Mobile computing environment is characterized by limited and dynamically varying available resources and stringent application requirements. Mobile applications are often time-constrained and severely energy constrained as battery power is the only available power source. The power consumed by an application depends on the performance level requested by the user/application. The mobile device can be viewed as the collection of devices such as processor, memory unit, keyboard, display, RF unit etc. Each of these devices can operate at different power states. The power state at which a particular device is operating depends upon the requirement of the application which is using the device. We propose a power management middleware for mobile devices, which not only consider energy savings for the processor but also optimize energy savings for other devices such as display unit, RF unit, keyboard, memory, etc. The proposed approach strives for optimizing the total system power by optimizing the power of individual devices for diverse applications running on the device. Our approach is generic enough to be used on any platform. We have validated our approach by testing two typical mobile applications but our approach can be easily scaled for multiple applications running concurrently.