Design a Low-Power Scheduling Mechanism for a Multicore Android System

Nowadays, multicore processors are widely adopted in the hand-held systems. Since the hand-held systems are powered by battery, the battery life will become the dominated limitation. An efficient low power scheduling mechanism for hand-held multicore system is become important today. This paper propose a novel low power scheduling mechanism, called Bounded-Power Multicore Dynamic Frequency Scaling (BPM-DFS), which integrates a system configuration selection algorithm and a task re-scheduling mechanism. According to the assigned power budget by the user, BPM-DFS can dynamically adjust the configuration of the multicore system to control the suitable alive core number, working frequency, and task reassignment, to achieve good performance and under the limitation of power consumption. The proposed BPM-DFS has been implemented on quad-core x86 Android system to compare the actual capabilities of Linux/Android build-in power managers. The experimental results reveal that BPM-DFS can save 25 % power consumption than Linux Performance mode.

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