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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, , 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: Background
Up: Graphical User Interface Energy
Previous: Graphical User Interface Energy
Lin Zhong
2003-10-13