Configurable and Adaptive Middleware for Energy-Efficient Distributed Mobile Computing

The energy demands of modern mobile devices are outstripping their battery lives. As a result, energy efficiency---fitting an energy budget and maximizing the utility of applications under given battery constraints---has become an important system design consideration. Because network communication incurs high energy costs in mobile applications, middleware presents a promising target for energy optimizations. Unfortunately, mainstream middleware mechanisms are oblivious to the highly volatile nature of mobile networks, operating over which energy efficiently requires aligning the middleware communication patterns with the network conditions in place. In this paper, we present a novel middleware architecture that optimizes energy consumption by adapting various facets of middleware functionality (e.g., data communication, encoding, and compression) dynamically in response to fluctuations in network conditions. By means of a simple configuration file, the programmer can specify the policies to follow for various parts of the communication functionality and how policies should be triggered by changes in network conditions. As compared to mainstream middleware mechanisms, our reference implementation improves the energy efficiency of mobile applications. Specifically, our benchmarks and case studies demonstrate that the new middleware architecture can reduce the energy budget of a typical third-party mobile application by as much as 30%.