Enhancing user experiences by exploiting energy and launch delay trade-off of mobile multimedia applications

• Published in: ACM transactions on embedded computing systems 2013-03, Vol.12 (1s), p.1-19
• Main Authors: Chung, Yi-Fan, Lo, Yin-Tsung, King, Chung-Ta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Delay; Electric batteries; Embedded computer systems; Mobile operating systems; Multimedia; Stacks; Strategy; Tradeoffs
• ISSN: 1539-9087; 1558-3465
• DOI: 10.1145/2435227.2435233

Launch delay has been an important factor affecting users' experiences in mobile multimedia applications. To launch applications quickly, modern mobile systems such as Android usually keep inactive applications in the background and manage them through an LRU-based activity stack. Whenever the user wants to run and interact with a background application again, that application can be switched back into the foreground quickly from the activity stack without delay in initializing the applications anew. Since background multimedia applications often continuously consume the battery power of the smart phone, the challenge is to effect a balance between application launch delay and battery lifetime. In this article, we propose innovative application management strategies that terminate “unbeneficial” background applications to save energy and pre-launch “beneficial” applications to improve the application launch delay. The proposed strategies are evaluated through a trace-driven simulation and a real experiment. The results show that the average application launch delay can be reduced by 15% while the average battery lifetime is increased by 18%.