User-Specific Skin Temperature-Aware DVFS for Smartphones

Abstract

Skin temperature of mobile devices intimately affects the user experience. Power management schemes built into smartphones can lead to quickly crossing a user's threshold of tolerable skin temperature. Furthermore, there is a significant variation among users in terms of their sensitivity. Hence, controlling the skin temperature as part of the device's power management scheme is paramount. To achieve this, we first present a method for estimating skin and screen temperature at run-time using a combination of available on-device thermal sensors and performance indicators. In an Android-based smartphone, we achieve 99.05% and 99.14% accuracy in estimations of back cover and screen temperatures, respectively. Leveraging this run-time predictor, we develop User-specific Skin Temperature-Aware (USTA) DVFS mechanism to control the skin temperature. Performance of USTA is tested both with benchmarks and user tests comparing USTA to the standard Android governor. The results show that more users prefer to use USTA as opposed to the default DVFS mechanism.