Context Aware Power Management of Mobile Systems for Sensing Applications

The widespread adoption of mobile, yet powerful smartphones enable the development of distributed sensing applications. For such applications, the smartphone plays a central role by acting as a bridge between user worn sensors and a remote server. Smartphone energy consumption is a critical issue that should be considered. As the user’s daily context continually changes, the application can dynamically adapt its behavior to the user context to reduce the smartphone energy consumption. In this work, we propose to use context knowledge to dynamically adapt the behavior of sensing applications running on smartphones. In our system a context aware application manager starts, suspends and changes the sampling rate of a sensing application according to current user’s context. We tested our technique on a real system and we show that it is can extend smartphone lifetime by 5x.