Application-Aware Power Management for Interactive Android Applications on HMP Platforms

Thanks to the performance improvements in SoC architectures, many applications, are now being migrated from desktop computers to mobile devices. However, this entails increased power consumption that necessitates more effective runtime power management techniques, especially for Android devices. In this work, we show that better power management is achievable by passing user-perceived requirements from applications to the OS. Such information allows for collaborative thread-to-core allocation, DVFS and power gating with respect to the users’ needs. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by studying two highly interactive applications: Mobile games and web browsing.