According to forecasts by the International Data Corporation, more people will surf the Web this year using their mobile devices to be on desktops or laptops. But the increasing complexity of mobile web pages means that web browsing has become an increasing drain on the batteries of mobile devices. The result of increasingly common is that the battery life of a handset is significantly reduced or mobile Web browsing slows to a creep conserve energy. Smartphone users are not happy with either outcome. And online businesses risk losing potential customers money if mobile devices can not offer a web browsing experience seamless.
One solution uses existing hardware smartphone smarter; it avoids wasting CPU performance or battery power at loading Web pages. Smartphone operating systems usually have a battery saving mode that uses the lowest frequency of the processor to minimize energy consumption and a performance mode that loads web pages as fast as possible using the highest frequency of the processor. Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have improved with a system that divides the difference by the loading of web pages using just the right frequency of the processor. They presented a paper describing the work to the IEEE Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture last month in Burlingame, California.
"The challenge is how to slow down just enough to save energy performance when the user will not notice anything," said Vijay Reddi, an electrical engineer and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, who was the one of the authors of the article.First, Reddi and his colleagues to predict performance and load energy consumption of individual web pages. Visit different pages can dramatically change the requirements of performance and power consumption for an application of the mobile browser, but surprisingly few people have bothered to take a look at the differences in performance and energy.This analysis allowed the team to create a scheduling system of the web page could load pages on a case by case basis depending on the frequency of each processor required. They tested the planning system in a "three-second rule" to ensure that all pages have been loaded into this time.The planning system ended up using 20.3 percent less energy than the performance mode while only violated the rule of three seconds to 2.2 percent more Web pages. At the same time, the planning system used 78.8 percent more energy than battery saving mode, reducing the number of violations of three second rule 37.1 percent.But the loading Web page is the first step in the mobile Web user experience. The group of Reddi presented another document at the same conference on how to achieve maximum energy efficiency during user interaction with mobile Web applications. Engineers have created a planner based on the events by analyzing the events of interactivity as a click-based touch or to scroll on the screen."This is how I take an application of the high-level interactivity and scheduling for these special events," said Reddi.The group tested a variety of interactive applications such as Web browser chrome, a photo editing application called CamanJS and a JavaScript port of the video game first-person shooter "Doom", among others. The scheduler based on an event recorded 37.9 percent and 22.9 percent, respectively, on energy consumption compared to two common Android governor modes called "interactive" and "OnDemand".These benefits of energy efficiency can be applied to existing systems smartphones by simply adjusting the Android phone operating systems or other. But Reddi wants to do more than just convince one or two mobile device manufacturers to adopt this approach. He wants to encourage wider conversation to the highest energy efficiency on the priority list for the design of mobile device software, rather than just always insisting on better performance.