Sensor-Based Power Management for Mobile Devices

Handheld devices are becoming an integral part of every day life in the home, office, and on the road. Furthermore, mobile devices are a key ingredient in the pervasive environments. To be effective, those devices need to be thrifty in power consumption, attentive to user intentions and environment changes and should be easily managed. Several sensor based applications such as GPS mapping, finger print based authentication, and accelerometer based hard disk protection are becoming popular in small hand held devices. In this paper, a formalized architecture is proposed to allow systematic access and use of low cost sensors that are being built into small hand held systems for various end user functions. Preliminary results of the impact of using sensors to save power in the mobile architecture based on various policies are shown. The low power platform used for the experiments and measurement of results is a concept platform developed at Intel® Labs. The sensor-board used in this project is made at ARCES Labs (University of Bologna), funded by *Ducati Sistemi S.p.A. and MIUR.