Mobile interface control scheme can extend battery life

Abstract

The proportion of cellphone users who have smartphones has been increasing. However, many smartphone users are unhappy with its battery life, which is shorter than that of conventional cellphones. Users attribute this problem to the energy consumption caused by the background traffic that installed applications create. In most cases, users are not unaware of the background traffic in their daily use, and the energy consumption of background traffic is actually significant, as A. Carrol et al. [1] mention. Several methods have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption due to this background traffic, including a method that limits the time allocated for sending outgoing packets[2]. However, existing control methods may affect the behavior of installed applications. In this paper, we propose a mobile interface control scheme for saving energy that has less impact on installed applications. Specifically, we focus on the energy consumption caused when the mobile interface remains in the ON state. Our method switches the states of mobile interfaces with fine granularity. We evaluated the proposed method and found that it reduced energy consumption by 40% to 57% in ordinary use.