Nipun Batra, Amit Kothari, Divyashikha Sethia
Abstract
As the market for mobile architectures continues its rapid growth, it has become increasingly important to understand and optimize the power consumption of these battery driven devices. While energy consumption has been heavily explored, there is one critical factor that is often overlooked- the end user. We shall also see the dependence of CO2 emissions on electricity consumed via battery powered devices and hence monitor the environmental effect our strategies shall have.
Our work deals with the reduction of carbon emissions by analyzing and reducing the battery consumption of mobile devices focusing specifically on Linux laptops and Android phones Due to the ease of accessibility and development for the open source platforms these two platforms have been studied.
We measure the effect of various components like brightness, wifi, bluetooth to gain vital information in the power usage breakdown. We discuss the significance of the power drawn by various components and identify the most promising areas to focus on for further improvements of power management. After focusing on the key issues like brightness and wifi several algorithms to reduce brightness not degrading user experience heavily were simulated on Micromax Android A60 phone and Ubuntu 10.10 powered Toshiba Laptop.Different classes of mathematical functions were employed by the algorithms to show how for instance by linearly decreasing brightness compares with using a geometrically decreasing brightness in saving battery life.
The results are very hopeful and reveal that we can save upto 51% of battery life by applying optimizations as suggested by the algorithms. In terms of CO2 emission on an average a single user may be able to reduce about 2kg emissions annually which is a big saving in terms of the environment and national economy.
Publication:
Optimizing Brightness Reduction for Battery Saving on Android mobile devices, Nipun Batra, Amit Kothari, Divyashikha Sethia, IBM ICARE, 2011