Content-Centric Energy Management of Mobile Displays

Despite numerous studies to reduce the power consumption of the display-related components of mobile devices, previous works have led to a deterioration in user experience due to compromised graphic quality. In this paper, we propose an effective scheme to reduce the energy consumption of the display subsystems of mobile devices without compromising user experience. In preliminary experiments, we noticed that mobile devices typically perform redundant display updates even if the display content does not change. Based on this observation, we first propose a metric called the content rate, which is defined as the number of meaningful frame changes in a second. Our scheme then estimates an optimal refresh rate based on the content rate in order to eliminate redundant display updates. Also proposed is the flicker compensation technique, which prevents the flickering problem caused by the reduced refresh rate. Extensive experiments conducted on the latest smartphones demonstrated that our system effectively reduces the overall power consumption of mobile devices by 35% while simultaneously maintaining satisfactory display quality.