ARIVU: Making Networked Mobile Games Green A Scalable Power-Aware Middleware

With the improved processing power, graphic quality and high-speed wireless connection in recent generations of mobile phones, it looks more attractive than ever to introduce networked games on these devices. However, these games consume higher levels of energy. While device features and application resource requirements are rapidly growing, the battery technologies are not growing at the same pace. Therefore, the main concern is the limitation of the battery power of such portable devices to support potentially long-hour of game play. In this paper we present ARIVU, a scalable power aware middleware that dynamically controls the energy consumption of wireless interface based on the game and system state while maintaining the user experience. The middleware is able to save up to 60% of the total energy consumed by the 802.11 g wireless interfaces for First Person Shooting (FPS) games and up to 35% of the total energy for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG).