Managing the Energy-Delay Tradeoff in Mobile Applications with Tempus

Energy-efficiency is a critical concern in continuously-running mobile applications, such as those for health and context monitoring. An attractive approach to saving energy in such applications is to defer the execution of delay-tolerant operations until a time when they would consume less energy. However, introducing delays to save power may have a detrimental impact on the user experience. To address this problem, we present Tempus, a new approach to managing the trade-off between energy savings and delay. Tempus saves power by enabling programmers to annotate power-hungry operations with states that specify when the operation can be executed to save energy. The impact of power management on timeliness is managed by associating delay budgets with objects that contain time-sensitive data. A static analysis and the run-time service ensure that power management policies will not delay an object more than its assigned budget. We demonstrate the expressive power of Tempus through a case study of optimizing two real-world applications. Furthermore, laboratory experiments show that Tempus may effectively manage the energy-delay trade-off on realistic workloads. For example, in a news application, five Tempus annotations may be used to create a policy that reduces the latency of downloading images 10 times compared to the original implementation without affecting energy consumption. Our experiments also indicate that the overhead of tracking budgets in Tempus is small.