Managing power for closed-source Android OS games by lightweight graphics instrumentation

Power consumption and battery life are important design concerns for mobile platforms. On these devices games can be considered as one of the most demanding applications in terms of computational cost and consumed energy. In this demo we showcase Android-based power management for games. We reduce the power consumption of games by scaling the processor's voltage and frequency. Towards this, the game's future workload has to be predicted. To accurately predict the workload, previous work heavily instrumented the game's source code itself. The source code is typically not available for up-to-date Android games. The work presented in this paper does not require any modification of the game's source code and therefore can as well be applied to closed source games. Towards this, we utilize the game's communication interfaces with the operating system to accurately predict a game's workload. The approach presented in the following has been implemented and tested on the PandaBoard ES [12] and Galaxy Nexus mobile phone with a number of popular closed-source games. Measurements show significant power savings while the gaming experience is maintained.