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Microsoft researcher Ranveer Chandra is developing methods to dramatically increase the battery life of mobile devices.Mobile phones and devices have already crossed the line from convenience to necessity, and we will likely grow even more reliant on them in the future.
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Microsoft researchers are working on a number of ways to make these gadgets both more useful and more fun.
They’ll be presenting their latest research at MobiSys 2015 (opens in new tab), an annual conference on mobile systems, applications and services that is taking place this week in Florence, Italy.
Here’s a snapshot of some of the research being presented.
Power up
Ranveer Chandra (opens in new tab) has a goal we can all get behind: He’d like to create a world in which we only have to worry about charging our mobile phone batteries every seven days or so (opens in new tab).
“We want to make a paradigm shift,” said Chandra, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research. “Rather than having you plug the phone in every day, we want you to plug in every week.”
Chandra argues that that kind of massive battery life improvement won’t just come from building better batteries. We also must figure out ways to make the ever-expanding world of things we want to do with our phones more energy-efficient.
“If you talk to people about how they want to improve battery life, most of them are still after that perfect battery,” he said. “At the same time, people should be looking at, ‘How do you get the best use out of the battery?'”
Chandra’s latest research project is a collaboration with Chi Zhang and Xinyu Zhang, two researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It focuses on an emerging technology called WiFi Display, or Miracast (download the Energy Efficient WiFi Display paper (opens in new tab), 565 KB .pdf). That’s a tool people use when they want to wirelessly project photos, a video or other content from a mobile phone to a larger screen, such as a TV in your living room or large screen in your conference space.
Reducing battery consumption
One of the biggest challenges with this screen-sharing scenario is that it quickly sucks up your mobile device’s battery life.
Ranveer and his colleagues used three different techniques to reduce battery consumption on the Android phone they were testing by 29 to 61 percent while using Miracast. The team saw similar benefits when implementing most of these techniques on Windows phones.
The solutions they developed also have implications for reducing battery consumption in other scenarios in which people are using wifi networks.
It’s yet another step toward that long-term goal of saving us all from the dreaded low-battery warning.
“We are getting hooked on our devices,” he said. “We are with them all the time, and we want more and more battery life out of them.”
Other papers being presented at MobiSys include:
Wearables Can Afford: Lightweight Indoor Positioning with Visible Light (opens in new tab)(2.7 MB .pdf): Microsoft researcher Jiansong Zhang (opens in new tab) collaborated with researchers from Hong Kong University and Wuhan University on a project called PIXEL, which improves visible light communication for wearable devices.
MAdScope: Characterizing Mobile In-App Targeted Ads (opens in new tab) (2.2 MB .pdf): Senior Microsoft researcher Suman Nath (opens in new tab) used a new tool to show that many apps are not targeting ads as well as they could. Targeted ads are a key revenue generator for many app developers.
Hardware and devices