Online OLED dynamic voltage scaling for video streaming applications on mobile devices

While OLED is replacing LCD and becoming the display of choice for mobile devices, display still consumes a large portion of total mobile device's power. Reducing OLED display power is of paramount importance for battery-powered mobile devices. With the explosive usage of video streaming on mobile devices, this paper proposes an online dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) approach for mobile video applications to reduce OLED display power consumption. A time-conscious DVS scheme, including scene change detection, voltage initialization and representative-region based voltage adjustment is developed and applied in video streaming. Based on the proposed scheme, flexible OLED DVS solutions can be adaptively derived according to timing constraints. Experimental results show that the proposed online technique achieves 17.3% power saving on average when compared with OLED display without DVS, which is 42.1% of the offline DVS power savings, while keeping more than 99% frames displayed in high quality.