Low power techniques for an android based phone

Abstract

Android is the latest trend in mobile operating systems. Even though Android provides a complete set of application, middleware and Linux kernel for the phone applications developer, it does not fully utilize several standard kernel features. This work attempts to address the limitations of Android specific to power management at kernel level and proposes possible solutions for active and static power management in Linux to overcome these limitations. The developed solutions for active power management include selection of suitable governor algorithm and modification of its parameters and implementation of a daemon process, which performs voltage and frequency scaling. Application level low power techniques for Android are also proposed to help application developers to optimize their software. The objectives of the work are realized by designing and implementing low power techniques for OMAP3530 based Beagleboard. The functionality of the implemented low power techniques is verified through several test cases using benchmarking applications such as 2D/3D rendering, playing a movie file and decompressing. The test execution results are presented in terms of performance, execution time, total current consumed, standby time and battery life. From these tests, it is concluded that through low power techniques it is possible to achieve up to 29% increase in battery life and up to 117% increase in standby time at no or very little performance degradation.