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Introduction

Energy consumption is a critical concern for handheld computers. User interfaces consisted of an average of 48% of the application code even a decade ago [18]. In modern personal computing systems, the user interface is almost always graphical, which only increases its fraction of source code and resource usage. GUIs are direct users of the display, one of the largest power-consumers in mobile computing systems[4,8]. Moreover, they determine how users interact with software. Much of the software used in mobile computing systems is not CPU-critical, $ i.e.$, the time and hence energy required to finish a task is dependent more on user interaction than on CPU speed. It is therefore important to improve system energy efficiency and awareness through GUI optimization. Energy efficiency refers to minimal energy usage to finish a task while energy awareness refers to the capability of trading other aspects of software for energy savings. GUI energy characterization is the first step towards the above goal. It not only helps choose the appropriate GUI platform and toolkit, but also helps design an energy-efficient and aware GUI. It is also important for incorporating energy scalability and awareness into software and trading different aspects of software for energy efficiency dynamically. In this work, we study three different GUI platforms on three handheld computers. However, our work should also be helpful in designing GUI software for other mobile computing systems, such as notebook computers. As far as we know, this is the first work on GUI energy characterization. This characterization shows that GUIs are expensive in terms of energy consumption, their different features consume drastically different amounts of energy, and different GUI platforms are quite different in terms of their energy consumption. The characterization suggests ways to make a GUI more energy-efficient and energy-aware, not only to prolong battery lifetime, but to also finish more tasks in a fixed amount of time. The paper is organized as follows. We first offer background information on GUI platforms and related works in Section II. Then we analyze how energy is consumed by a GUI in Section III and describe the experimental setup and benchmarks in Section IV. Based on the experimental results presented in Section V, we offer insights for energy-efficient and aware GUI design in Section VI. Finally, we conclude in Section VII.
next up previous
Next: Background Up: Graphical User Interface Energy Previous: Graphical User Interface Energy
Lin Zhong 2003-10-13