Computer scientists at Aston University in Birmingham UK have developed a new way to drastically improve battery-life of mobile devices as much as 60 percent. The new research journal ‘Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies’ published on Monday describes a new way of optimizing mobile battery life by combining mobile computing with cloud computing.
It essentially talks about how mobile apps could be executed on the cloud instead of the mobile device in to save battery life of a smartphone or a tablet by up to 60 percent. Using the new method, it first identifies power-hungry parts of the mobile-cloud hybrid application, and then offloads these to the cloud instead of mobile.
During this new “code-offloading” technique, the device’s own components are not used, power is saved which prolongs the battery life over 60 percent with over one MB of data usage.
Doctoral researcher Aamir Akbar, who developed the framework said, “So far, we have carried out experiments on two different Android apps. On one, our results showed that battery consumption could be reduced by over 60 percent, at an additional cost of just over one MB of network usage. On the second app, the app used 35 percent less power.”
The mobile-cloud computing in itself is not a new concept, but it is the first time a general-purpose of technology has been developed by computer scientists at Aston University.
Dr. Peter Lewis of Aston University said, “By instrumenting mobile apps and using optimization algorithms to search for efficient app configurations, the tools identify the most power-hungry parts of a mobile app and move them to the cloud. And since our framework is general-purpose, it can be applied to any mobile app.”
Additionally, scientists also mention that they are now working to apply the same technique to battery-powered mobile robots for working situations where battery lifetime is critical.
