Satisfying Energy-Efficiency Constraints for Mobile Systems

Abstract

Energy-efficiency is one of the most important design criteria for mobile systems, such as smartphones and tablets. But current mobile systems always over-provision resources to satisfy users. The root cause is that, we have no knowledge on how much of system performance/energy will exactly satisfy users. Psychophysics defines the quantified link between physical stimuli and human-perceived stimuli. So, we will leverage psychophysics to study the quantified correlation between computer architecture resources (i.e., physical stimuli) and user satisfaction (i.e., human-perceived stimuli). We then exploit such correlation to precisely apportion resources to operate tasks and accurately satisfy users. Benefiting from our precisely-defined user satisfaction criteria and well-designed algorithms, we can reduce energy consumption of computer architectures by up to 42.9% without harming user experience. To the best of our knowledge, we for the first time theoretically and accurately model such substantial correlation. Our work opens a new research domain for fundamentally improving mobiles’ energy-efficiency.