Feature Interaction Control on Smartphones

Smartphones are becoming increasingly complex software-intensive devices. The platforms supporting these devices need to cope with the growing complexity while maximising the use of the underlying hardware. At the same time, manufacturers need to ensure that the different features do not clash or have undesired interactions between them, leading to a bad user experience and ultimately a bad perception of the product. This paper focuses on one of the common resources used by all features in the system; namely, processor capacity. While it is desirable to maximise the use of available processor capacity, overuse can have dire consequences for usability. We present the Application Superstate Control System, a centralised approach based on a negotiation protocol for sharing the available capacity among features in a configurable fashion. Manufacturers and platform integrators can get visibility over feature interactions and control their outcome with the proposed framework.