Scientists at Aston University in Birmingham revealed Monday they have drastically improved the life of smart phone and tablet batteries by up to 60 percent.
They developed a mobile-cloud hybrid application framework for Android that hybridizes mobile apps, executing them across both mobile and cloud platforms.
The research, published in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies Journal, describes a solution that integrates mobile computing with cloud computing, with tools developed to identify the most power hungry parts of a mobile app and then moves them to the cloud using a technique called code-offloading.
Using the technique, the power hungry parts of the mobile-cloud hybrid application are identified and offloaded to the cloud and executed there, instead of on the device itself. As they execute on the cloud instead of the mobile device, the device's own components are not used, power is saved which prolongs the battery life.
While mobile-cloud computing in itself is not a new concept, the Aston computer scientists are the first to develop a general-purpose and flexible solution to offloading the power hungry parts of a mobile app to the cloud, whatever they may be.
Doctoral researcher Aamir Akbar, who developed the framework said: "So far, we have carried out experiments on two different Android apps.
"On one, our results showed that battery consumption could be reduced by over 60 percent, at an additional cost of just over 1 MB of network usage. On the second app, the app used 35 percent less power."
Dr. Peter Lewis of Aston University said: "By instrumenting mobile apps and using optimisation algorithms to search for efficient app configurations, the tools identify the most power-hungry parts of a mobile app and move them to the cloud. And since our framework is general-purpose, it can be applied to any mobile app."
The researchers said they are now working to apply the technique to battery powered mobile robots that could be used in a variety of situations, for example, in search and rescue operations, where battery lifetime is critical.
