Batch Scheduling of Recurrent Applications for Energy Savings on Mobile Phones

Abstract

Recurrent applications that mostly run in the background are a significant source of power consumption on battery-limited mobile phones. We highlight the pitfalls of scheduling such applications independently without awareness of each other's schedules. We illustrate the significant energy savings that can be achieved via batch scheduling of recurrent mobile phone applications. We then present our on-going work on developing a general batch scheduling framework for such applications and also outline our early experiences studying the benefit of batch scheduling on two different mobile phone platforms-Nokia N95 and HTC (Android) - that are commonly used in the research community.