App-Oriented Thermal Management of Mobile Devices

The thermal issue for mobile devices becomes critical as the devices' performance increases to handle complicated applications. Conventional thermal management limits the performance of the entire device, degrading the quality of both foreground and background applications. This is not desirable because the quality of the foreground application, i.e., the frames per second (FPS), is directly affected, whereas users are generally not aware of the performance of background applications. In this paper, we propose an app-oriented thermal management scheme that specifically restricts background applications to preserve the FPS of foreground applications. For efficient thermal management, we developed a model that predicts the heat contribution of individual applications based on hardware utilization. The proposed system gradually limits system resources for each background application according to its heat contribution. The scheme was implemented on a Galaxy S8+ smartphone, and its usefulness was validated with a thorough evaluation.