A Power Saving Method with Consideration of Performance in Android Terminals

Smart phones and tablet PCs have become increasingly popular over the past years. Especially, Android OS is increasing its market share rapidly. In line with the growing importance of Android OS, their terminals are improving their performance and power consumption. There are some existing studies on Android terminals' performance or studies on power consumption. However, there is a trade-off between performance and power saving. Thus, they should be considered together. In this paper, we propose a method for saving power consumption with consideration of performance in Android terminals. The proposed method gains feedback information from applications and dynamically adjusts CPU clock frequency at runtime in order to provide required performance and save power consumption. For evaluation, we implemented a drawing framework using the proposed method and a benchmark application which calculated a trigonometric function and drew images using the framework. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed method could save more power consumption with providing the required performance than methods without dynamic CPU clock frequency adjustment.