MobiCore: An adaptive hybrid approach for power-efficient CPU management on Android devices

Abstract

Smartphones are becoming essential devices used for various types of applications in our daily life. To satisfy the ever-increasing performance requirement, the number of CPU cores in a phone keeps growing, which imposes a great impact on its power consumption. This work presents a series of analysis to understand how the current Android resource management policy adjusts CPU features. Our results indicate a significant improvement margin for CPU power efficiency in modern Android smartphones. We then propose MobiCore — a power-efficient CPU management scheme that can optimize the use of Dynamic and Frequency Voltage Scaling (DVFS) and the Dynamic Core Scaling (DCS) techniques with a sensitive control on CPU bandwidth. The measurements on the real systems prove that MobiCore can achieve substantial CPU power reduction compared to state-of-the-art architectures.