A case for regulating mobile device power consumption

We all love our smartphones, don't we? The more the merrier. Retina display, HD videos, GPS, Gaming - these are good, no doubt. But do we think what will happen when these devices proliferate in large numbers in an energy starved economy? In little drops we are draining away a mighty ocean.

India has 900 million mobile devices (roughly). For ease of calculation, assume each consumes 1 Watt-Hour of electricity a day. The more the talk time, the more the games and videos - more is the power consumed. This means every day we are spending 900 Mega-Watt-Hour of energy by using mobile phones. When we consider that we consume 2 Watts in effect instead of 1 Watt due to transmission losses and poor mobile designs, this is an alarming 1,800 MWh of energy consumed a day - roughly equal to running both units of Kudankulam nuclear plant for 1 hour at near full capacity.

Most device makers have very limited understanding of software-hardware interaction. They simply assemble and give you products to make quick bucks. The average margins in the market are between 30-50%. So why bother about power optimization?

In next 3-5 years as we move towards LTE/4G, power consumption in these little devices is going to increase dramatically from the current base. Device makers are likely to trade-off performance to power optimization. Hence it is essential for all of us to wake up to the issue of power wastage in mobile devices and look for better ways of power management. At Vigyanlabs, this is what we are working on. Try out our first Android offering - IPMPlus Touch2Sleep Beta.

Application Sensors and Intelligent Power Management Part #1

What aids powers Intelligent Power Management is the concept of Application Sensors. Just like we have temperature, light, proximity sensors which sense and aid the instruments in better control, an equivalent component in the IT Infrastructure is the  Application Sensor. Application Sensors sense which applications are running and what components of the hardware they use and provide the intelligence to selectively turn on or turn off hardware components in a system. Multiple applications can be running on a given system, however what is important is the critical list of applications. Let us consider the case of a Laptop, while doing a power point presentation (or any other presentation application) - the display output (rather the external projector/display) has to be on, whereas other components like disks can be powered off if they are not in use.  When the presentation is completed, after power point is closed, the display output can be turned off if the user is not using the system. Consider the conventional power management where we tend to disable the power management entirely while doing a presentation.  Similarly if a background application is doing a file download or transfer, while the user is away from the desktop, the display can be turned off, cpu can be in a lower power mode. If the download completes and the user is still away from the desktop, the system can be allowed to go to either standby or hibernate thus saving power.

IPMPlus provides few built in application sensors for applications which do download, file copy, presentation (power point). In addition user can define his/her own application sensors and selectively turn on/off hardware components and thus save power.  To summarize Application Sensors provide the intelligence to selectively turn-on or turn-off hardware components of a system while the system is in use and helps us to save power without interrupting the users work.  In the next article I will talk about how to define application sensors.

The concept of Intelligent Power Management

Power management has been an ubiquitous feature in all aspects of IT infrastructure for a long time. If so, what is new about Intelligent Power Management? Read on to understand the subtle differences.

In the traditional approach to power management, power optimizations are generic in nature. The  optimizations are not based on understanding the application-OS-hardware interactions. Hence these optimizations aren't always the best.

Power management in the traditional approach relies on time-based policies - even so, no solution exists for enterprise-wide administration of such policies. IPM as defined by Vigyanlabs is not time-based. Instead it is based on application sensors - a technology patented by us. The power management policies are based on applications and are customizable as per the application needs. A good IPM platform allows such application-sensor based power schemes to be administered in an enterprise-wide manner.

Traditional power management approaches are device specific and consequently, not scalable. A truly intelligent power management platform is scalable and should be implementable across a wide spectrum of devices and operating systems in varied operating environments.


Traditional approaches are intrusive. They either trade-off user experience (e.g.: your laptop goes into standby when you are presenting) or performance In our IPMPlus approach, we ensure non-intrusiveness and do not trade-off power management against either performance or user experience.

Finally, intelligent power management is about quantifiable power savings which is not possible in traditional power management approaches.