Maximizing the user experience with energy-based fair sharing in battery limited mobile systems

Currently, the usefulness of many mobile systems is largely limited by the battery lifetime. In this paper, energy-based fair queuing (EFQ) is proposed as a pivotal instrument to maximize the user experience in this type of system. Energy-based fair queuing is a novel class of energy-aware scheduling algorithms that support proportional energy use, effective time-constraint compliance and a flexible trade-off between them. The combination of EFQ with lifetime-oriented power management schemes opens the door to maximize the user experience of battery-limited mobile systems. Moreover, it is suggested to merge traditional energy-efficient algorithms with EFQ to further improve the user experience. The proposed EFQ algorithm is implemented in the Linux kernel V3.3 and verified on a testbench based on an open source Linux scheduler simulator with user-specified energy loads. Simulation results show that EFQ is more effective and flexible than the Linux scheduler in maximizing the user experience of energy-limited mobile systems.