Power Profiling of Context Aware Systems: A Contemporary Analysis and Framework for Power Conservation

With the advent of smart, inexpensive devices and a highly connected world, a need for smart service discovery, delivery, and adaptation has appeared. This interconnection is composed of sensors within devices or placed externally in the surrounding environment. Our research addresses this need through a context aware system, which adapts to the users' context. Given that the devices are mobile and battery operated, the main challenge in a context awareness approach is power conservation. The devices are composed of small sensors that consume power in the order of a few mW. However, their consumptions increase manifold during data processing. There is a need to conserve power while delivering the requisite functionality of the context aware system. Therefore, this feature is termed as 'power awareness.' In this paper, we describe different power awareness techniques and compare them in terms of their conservation effectiveness. In addition, based on the investigations and comparison of the results, a power aware framework is proposed for a context aware system.