As the current generation of mobile smartphones become more powerful, they are being used to perform more resource intensive tasks making battery lifetime a major bottle-neck. In this paper, we present a technique called dynamic AoV lookahead for reducing wireless interface power consumption upto 50% while playing a popular, yet resource intensive, mobile multiplayer games.

In this paper, we show how tone mapping techniques can be used to dynamically increase the image brightness, thus allowing the LCD backlight levels to be reduced. This saves significant power as the majority of the LCD's display power is consumed by its backlight. The Gamma function (or equivalent) can be efficiently implemented in smartphones with minimal resource cost. We describe how we overcame the Gamma function's non-linear nature by using adaptive thresholds to apply different Gamma values to images with differing brightness levels. These adaptive thresholds allow us to save significant amounts of power while preserving the image quality. We implemented our solution on a laptop and two Android smartphones. Finally, we present measured analytical results for two different games (Quake III and Planeshift), and user study results (using Quake III and 60 participants) that shows that we can save up to 68% of the display power without significantly affecting the perceived gameplay quality.

The current generation of mobile smartphones are not just devices for voice communication. Instead, they are frequently used as mobile PC replacements that are used to edit documents, browse the web, check email, and play games. However, this functionality comes at the cost of battery lifetimes. Indeed, to maintain the slim form factor required for these phones (which impacts the amount of battery that can be put into the phone), it is quite common for the battery lifetimes of smartphones to be significantly shorter compared to previous generation of "dumber" phones.