Improving smartphone user experience by balancing performance and energy with probabilistic QoS guarantee

User satisfaction is pivotal to the success of a mobile application. A recent study has shown that 49% of users would abandon a web-based application if it failed to load within 10 seconds. At the same time, it is imperative to maximize energy efficiency to ensure maximum usage of the limited energy source available to smartphones while maintaining the necessary levels of user satisfaction. An important factor to consider, that has been previously neglected, is variability of execution times of an application, requiring them to be modeled as stochastic quantities. This changes the nature of the objective function and the constraints of the underlying optimization problem. In this paper, we present a new approach to optimal energy control of mobile applications running on modern smartphone devices, focusing on the need to ensure a specified level of user satisfaction. The proposed statistical models address both single and multi-stage applications and are used in the formulation of an optimization problem, the solution to which is a static, lightweight controller that optimizes energy efficiency of mobile applications, subject to constraints on the likelihood that the application execution time meets a given deadline. We demonstrate the proposed models and the corresponding optimization method on three common mobile applications running on a real Qualcomm Snapdragon 8074 mobile chipset. The results show that the proposed statistical estimates of application execution times are within 99.34% of the measured values. Additionally, on the actual Qualcomm Snapdragon 8074 mobile chipset, the proposed control scheme achieves a 29% power savings over commonly-used Linux governors while maintaining an average web page load time of 2 seconds with a likelihood of 90%.