Many smartphone applications, e.g., file backup, are intrinsically delay-tolerant so that data processing and transfer can be delayed to reduce smartphone battery usage. In the literature, these energy-delay tradeoff issues have been addressed independently in the forms of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) problems and network selection problems when smartphones have multiple wireless interfaces. In this paper, we jointly optimize the CPU speed and network speed to determine how much more energy can be saved through the joint optimization when applications can tolerate delays. We propose a dynamic speed scaling scheme called SpeedControl that jointly adjusts the processing and networking speeds using four controls: application scheduling, CPU speed control, wireless interface selection, and transmit power control. Through invoking the “Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty” technique, the scheme is demonstrated to be near optimal because it substantially reduces energy consumption for a given delay constraint. This paper is the first to reveal the energy-delay tradeoff relationship from a holistic perspective for smartphones with multiple wireless interfaces, DVFS, and multitasking capabilities. The trace-driven simulations based on real measurements of CPU power, network power, WiFi/3G throughput, and CPU workload demonstrate that SpeedControl can reduce battery usage by more than 42% through trading a 10 minutes delay when compared with the same delay in existing schemes; moreover, this energy conservation level increases as the WiFi coverage extends.

Energy-delay tradeoffs in smartphone applications have been studied independently in dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) problem and network interface selection problem. We optimize the two problems jointly to quantify how much energy can be saved further and propose a scheme called SpeedControl which jointly manages application scheduling, CPU speed control and wireless interface selection. The scheme is shown to be near-optimal in that it tends to minimize energy consumption for given delay constraints. This paper is the first to reveal energy-delay tradeoffs in a holistic view considering multiple wireless interfaces, DVFS and multitasking in smartphone. We perform real measurements on WiFi/3G coverage and throughput, power consumption of CPU and WiFi/3G interfaces, and CPU workloads. Trace-driven simulations based on the measurements demonstrate that SpeedControl can save over 30% of battery by trading 10 min delay as compared to existing schemes when WiFi temporal coverage is 65%, moreover, the saving tendency increases as WiFi coverage increases.