SCQ: Stage-based, Context-aware, QoE-driven Power Optimization for Interactive Applications on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become our daily necessities. People spent a lot of time using their smartphones, especially on interactive applications such as social networks, web browsing, and games. To conserve power consumption of such applications becomes ultimately important. Prior works try to save power by balancing performance and workload. These approaches are not comprehensive because they do not take user experience (or Quality of Experience, QoE) into account. Overlooking this factor may turn out to subscribe an excessive performance that the user cannot even perceive, leading to a waste of power. Users' QoE is affected by many factors, including their contexts and the stage of the application. Estimating the QoE requirements for different situations is not only complicated but also crucial. In this paper, we attack this complex problem by first predicting the execution stages of the interactive applications and then applying a stage-based, context-aware, QoE-driven governor (SCQ) to adjust the CPU frequency. Experimental results show that our approach can save 23% more power than the default governor without affecting users' QoE.