About
As devices grow smaller and mobility becomes a reality, energy management is becoming a serious concern. Current approaches to manage energy, including dynamic voltage scaling and adaptively turning off unneeded components, only allow current laptops to remain active for up to 8 hours on a single charge. Other mobile devices, such as PDAs, are similarly limited in battery lifetime.In order to conserve energy, devices are often put into a low-power suspension or hibernation state. While in these low-power states devices are unable to communicate and are unaware of available network resources.
The Hierarchical Power Management (HPM) project is a research effort aimed at allowing devices to remain aware of their environment with minimal impact on battery lifetime. Our approach is to integrate a hierarchy of independent platforms, optimized for different functionalities and workloads, into a single form factor. When not needed, the higher more power-hungry tiers can be powered down or suspended while lower tiers perform service discovery and small maintenance tasks. Our focus is to understand the practical realities of using hierarchical architectures and to provide OS-level mechanisms that effectively use such architectures to maximize battery lifetime.
Our two active projects are Turducken, a hierarchical approach to building mobile devices, and Triage, a HPM supporting software framework for tiered microservers.
