Switch: A Battery Conservation Framework for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Sophisticated mobile applications may require more resources than are readily available on mobile devices. Mobile device resources such as processing power and storage can be extended with cloud-based mobile augmentation. However, some resources, specifically battery life and bandwidth, cannot be augmented. This research identifies that it is important to be able to estimate the energy consumption of both offloaded and local tasks when making offloading decisions. Due to the fact that the energy consumption profile of mobile devices with diverse capabilities are not the same, this aspect needs to be considered. This research proposes the Switch framework to conserve the limited battery life on mobile devices using a device specific energy consumption profile. The evaluation of the framework suggests that Switch can successfully be used to conserve battery life on mobile devices by making intelligent offloading decisions.