A Tour into Ambient Energy Resources and Battery Optimization

Modern mobile devices incorporate rich collection of sensing and communication capabilities allowing the design of diverse range of interactive context aware applications. Intensive use of these resources comes at a cost, typically in the form of reduced battery life. Therefore, limited battery power is one of the major drawbacks of mobile communication and hence managing battery life is an important research issue. Managing battery life has two viewpoints: (i) harvesting and (ii) managing. Harvesting energy from the surrounding environment is very interesting and a promising research direction, but this scavenging provides very limited amount of energy. Managing the available energy in mobile devices efficiently to extend the battery life and also to maximize the usage of the enhanced features of the modern mobiles is another research direction. In this paper, we give an overview of the ambient energy harvesting and energy consumed by mobiles.