Energy efficiency of handheld computer interfaces: limits, characterization and practice

Energy efficiency has become a critical issue for battery-driven computers. Significant work has been devoted to improving it through better software and hardware. However, the human factors and user interfaces have often been ignored. Realizing their extreme importance, we devote this work to a comprehensive treatment of their role in determining and improving energy efficiency. We analyze the minimal energy requirements and overheads imposed by known human sensory/speed limits. We then characterize energy efficiency for state-of-the-art interfaces available on two commercial handheld computers. Based on the characterization, we offer a comparative study for them. Even with a perfect user interface, computers will still spend most of their time and energy waiting for user responses due to an increasingly large speed gap between users and computers in their interactions. Such a speed gap leads to a bottleneck in system energy efficiency. We propose a low-power low-cost cache device, t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Lin Zhong, Niraj K. Jha
• Keywords: Energy Efficiency, Low-power Low-cost Cache, Minimal Energy Requirements, MOBISYS 2005, Wireless Networks