API for power-aware application design on mobile systems.

Thanks to the performance improvements in hardware and software architectures, more applications, which used to run on desktop computers, are now being migrated to mobile devices. However, this entails increased power consumption, that necessitates more effective runtime power management techniques due to battery capacity constraints. Such techniques should reduce power consumption while satisfying user-perceived requirements, such as frame rate, and response times. A major hurdle in incorporating such techniques into real products is that user-perceived requirements are only visible to user applications, but not accessible by the power managers residing in the operating system. In this paper, we show that better power management is achievable by passing such information to the OS, and propose an API for that purpose.