Resource Management in Mobile Devices

App-enabled smartphones have been outselling PCs for the past several years. The portability, compact form factor, and feature rich convergence capabilities of app-based devices have fueled their rapid adoption by consumers. However that future growth of this computing paradigm will be critically hampered by battery technology limitations that today make it impossible to operate these devices beyond a few hours for common use cases such as watching streaming video or using the GPS. Often, users end up having to manually shut down location services, turn off Wi-Fi radio, reduce backlight brightness, etc. to extend battery lifetime. These steps are not only cumbersome but also disrupt opportunities for ambient intelligence and collaborative computing. If the several well publicized reports of excessive battery drain in the latest app-based portable devices are any indication, the manner in which energy is optimized in app-based devices requires a radical rethink.

The research objective of this project is to achieve aggressive battery lifetime enhancements for app-based portable computing devices via a coordinated cross layer effort that bridges the gap between user, software application, OS, and hardware component levels. The research focus is on a self-reconfigurable middleware layer that continuously rearranges and tunes available functional and non-functional components into value-added and tailored aggregations that optimize energy consumption. The research aims to derive insights from cross-platform and cross-device profiling studies to develop models for user interaction, battery discharge, and context estimation. The project exploits machine learning techniques as well as new models of computation, e.g., offloading computation from the device to the cloud in an opportunistic manner at runtime.

Selected Publications

S. Pasricha, Raid Ayoub, M. Kishinevsky, S. K. Mandal, U. Y. Ogras, “A Survey on Energy Management for Mobile and IoT Devices”, IEEE Design and Test, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 7-24, Oct 2020

M. Adkins, Q. Han, S. Pasricha, “Quality-Aware Voice Convergecast in Mobile Low Power Wireless Networks”, IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE), Hangzhou, China, June 14-15, 2019.

A. Khune, S. Pasricha, “Mobile Network-Aware Middleware Framework for Energy Efficient Cloud Offloading of Smartphone Applications”, IEEE Consumer Electronics, Vol. 8, Iss. 1, Jan 2019.

S. Pasricha, “Overcoming Energy and Reliability Challenges for IoT and Mobile Devices with Data Analytics,” IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID), Pune, India, Jan 2018.

S. Tiku, S. Pasricha, “Energy-Efficient and Robust Middleware Prototyping for Smart Mobile Computing,” IEEE International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping (RSP), Oct 2017.

S. Pasricha, J. Doppa, K. Chakrabarty, S. Tiku, D. Dauwe, S. Jin, P. Pande, “Data Analytics Enables Energy-Efficiency and Robustness: From Mobile to Manycores, Datacenters, and Networks”, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS), Oct 2017.

B. Donohoo, C. Ohlsen, S. Pasricha, “A Middleware Framework for Application-aware and User-specific Energy Optimization in Smart Mobile Devices”, Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 20, pp. 47-63, Jul 2015.

B. Donohoo, C. Ohlsen, S. Pasricha, C. Anderson, Y. Xiang, “Context-Aware Energy Enhancements for Smart Mobile Devices”, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), Vol 13, No. 8, pp. 1720-1732, Aug 2014. 

D. Jaramillo, V. Ugave, R. Smart, S. Pasricha, “A Secure Cross-Platform Hybrid Mobile Enterprise Voice Agent,” IEEE SoutheastCon, Mar 2014. 

B. Donohoo, C. Ohlsen, S. Pasricha, C. Anderson, “Exploiting Spatiotemporal and Device Contexts for Energy-Efficient Mobile Embedded Systems”, IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC), Jul. 2012. 

B. Donohoo, C. Ohlsen, S. Pasricha, “AURA: An Application and User Interaction Aware Middleware Framework for Energy Optimization in Mobile Devices”, IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), Oct. 2011. 

S. Pasricha, S. Mohapatra, M. Luthra, N. Dutt, N. Subramanian, “Co-optimization of Streaming Multimedia QoS and Backlight Power Consumption for Mobile Handheld Devices“, Special Issue Journal of Korean Multimedia Society (KSSM), Dec 2003