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SOD: Making Smartphone Smart on Demand with Radio Interface Management

Published:15 March 2019Publication History
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Abstract

A major concern for today’s smartphones is their much faster battery drain than traditional feature phones, despite their greater battery capacities. The difference is mainly contributed by those more powerful but also much more power-consuming smartphone components, such as the multi-core application processor and the high-definition (HD) display. While the application processor must be active when any smart apps are being used, it is also unnecessarily waken up, even during idle periods, to perform operations related to basic phone functions (i.e., incoming calls and text messages). In addition, the power-hungry HD display is also used unnecessarily for such basic functions.

In this article, we investigate how to increase the battery life of smartphones by minimizing the use of application processor and HD display for operations related to basic functions. We find that the application processor is often waken up by a process running on it, called the Radio Interface Layer Daemon (RILD), which interfaces the user and apps to the GSM/LTE cellular network. In particular, we demonstrate that a great amount of energy could be saved if RILD is stopped, such that the application processor can sleep more often. Based on this key finding, we design a Smart On Demand (SOD) configuration that reduces the smartphone energy consumption by running RILD operations on a secondary low-power microcontroller and by using a secondary low-power display to interface the user with basic functions. As a result, basic phone functions can be handled at much lower energy costs and the power-consuming components, i.e., application processor and HD display, are waken up only when one needs to use any smart apps, in an on-demand manner. We have built a hardware prototype of SOD and evaluated it with real user traces. Our results show that SOD can increase its battery life by up to 2.5 more days.

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Index Terms

  1. SOD: Making Smartphone Smart on Demand with Radio Interface Management

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        Jose Manuel M. Palomares

        Smartphone batteries don't last as long as they used to. Why Applications consume a lot of energy. However, the authors show that, besides the display, which is the most power-hungry service, all tasks related to the radio interface consume large amounts of energy. The authors propose a prototype of a service called smart on demand (SOD). This service runs the radio interface layer daemon (RILD) in a low-power secondary microcontroller. This service reduces energy consumption when no other apps are active. The prototype has been tested under real user traces of representative smartphone usage. Phone calls are managed by the RILD. This service checks for any incoming phone call to start the connection. The authors tested deactivating and resuming RILD for different configurations. For a LG V10 smartphone, the power consumption before the RILD suspension is 70mW. On the other hand, the power consumption of the system after RILD suspension is reduced to 39mW. However, the RILD suspension procedure itself consumes as much as 200mW. Therefore, it is necessary to take a long suspension time to compensate the suspension power overhead. They show that RILD should be suspended for a period longer than 60 seconds to obtain power consumption benefits. Using the user traces of smartphone usage, the authors show that two consecutive phone calls in an interval shorter than 60 seconds has a probability between five and ten percent (with 17 percent in the worst case). Therefore, suspending RILD will lead to large power savings, as most intervals are longer than 60 seconds. However, RILD is also responsible for cellular data management and updates. RILD uses the cellular network for sending and receiving updates for the smart applications running in the background. Most applications require less than 15 seconds to update all the information. The authors, in testing, suspend RILD for intervals ranging from one to 30 minutes. These values include most update intervals of the most common applications (such as WhatsApp, ranging from five to 25 minutes; Facebook, 30 minutes; and Outlook, 15 minutes). Their experiments show that using an RILD suspension interval of 20 minutes results in an increment of five percent of power consumption (compared to a no update at all policy), or a 15 percent of power consumption (for the same no update policy) using a five minute interval. The authors provide a very large set of experiments to test the savings of the SOD proposal in different environments and configurations. Those experiments show an average battery life extension of 2.5 times the standard configuration. Moreover, they show, with real user traces, that SOD is able to extend the battery life from 0.3 to 1.4 days in one dataset, and from 0.25 to 1.6 days in the other dataset, compared to the standard configuration using a big.LITTLE application processor. This paper may represent a quantitative jump in the battery life extension of smartphones using a very simple technology. I recommend this interesting proposal for any smartphone enterprise designer.

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
          ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 13, Issue 3
          September 2018
          98 pages
          ISSN:1556-4665
          EISSN:1556-4703
          DOI:10.1145/3320018
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2019 ACM

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 15 March 2019
          • Accepted: 1 September 2018
          • Revised: 1 June 2018
          • Received: 1 February 2018
          Published in taas Volume 13, Issue 3

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