ABSTRACT
Energy efficiency is a very important and challenging issue for resource-constrained mobile computers. Here, a novel dynamic software management (DSOM) framework to improve battery utilization is introduced. DSOM module is designed and implemented in user space, independent of the operating system. DSOM explores quality-of-service adaptation to reduce system energy and employs a priority based pre-emption policy for multiple applications to avoid competition for limited energy resources. Software energy macromodels for mobile applications are employed to predict energy demand at each QoS level, so that DSOM module is able to select the best possible trade-off between energy conservation and application QoS; it also honors the priority desired by the user. Experimental results on some mobile applications like video player, speech recognizer and voice-over-IP show that this approach can meet user specified task oriented goals and significantly improve battery utilization.