Modern smartphones are notorious for consuming energy far too quickly, especially for access to the Internet through wireless radios. Although certain advances have been made on the hardware side such as better batteries, this research is focused on improving energy management software to make better use of existing batteries. Considering that the frequency of use of these radios is spurred by the popularity of smartphone applications, the wide availability of applications, for instance the Android Market has over 500,000 registered applications, shows that the need to save smartphone radio energy is highly relevant and urgent today.
Different from existing research, this high-risk high-reward research takes a network traffic aware approach to save smartphone radio energy. The main intellectual merits include: (1) Solutions for determining low priority delay tolerant smartphone applications without assistant from application developers. (2) Solutions for determining delay tolerant traffic periods within high priority real-time smartphone applications. (3) Solutions for tracking low priority delay tolerant applications, and delay tolerant traffic periods in high priority real-time applications through the system to optimize radio energy efficiency.
This research will extend smartphone battery lifetime with the potential to benefit over one billion smartphone users worldwide. User experience of smartphone usage will be enhanced. Industry smartphone practice will also be improved. This research will be integrated into three courses, and also benefit research of female graduate students and undergraduate students. Special distribution efforts are also planned to increase the number of women and girls in computing.
