Freezing

Abstract

Numerous functionalities are provided by the smartphone and prolonging its battery lifetime is an undeniably critical issue to support them. In this paper, we propose a low-power scheme called \textit{Uninteresting Region Freezing} (URF) that achieves significant total power consumption reduction of the smartphone by reducing unnecessary drawing computation that originates from the user's uninteresting display region. Moreover, we devise a user interface that helps the user to use our scheme flexibly and easily. We implement URF and its user interface on a real smartphone (Nexus 6). Then, we experiment with two existing low-power schemes, partial display darkening and maximum frame rate restriction, to evaluate our scheme. The results indicate that the URF scheme achieves additional total power consumption reduction by 5.1% to 12.5% and by 2.4% to 7.1%, compared with the partial display darkening and the maximum frame rate restriction schemes, respectively.