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3rd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services — Abstract
Pp. 247–260 of the Proceedings
Energy Efficiency of Handheld Computer Interfaces: Limits, Characterization, and Practice
Lin Zhong and Niraj K. Jha, Princeton University
Abstract
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, to
which the host computer can outsource simple tasks, as an interface
solution to overcome the bottleneck. We discuss the design and
prototype implementation of a low-power wireless wrist-watch for use
as a cache device for interfacing.
With this work, we wish to engender more interest in the mobile
system design community in investigating the impact of user
interfaces on system energy efficiency and to harvest the
opportunities thus exposed.
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