Context-aware application scheduling in mobile systems: What will users do and not do next?

Abstract

Usage patterns of mobile devices depend on a variety of factors such as time, location, and previous actions. Hence, context-awareness can be the key to make mobile systems to become personalized and situation dependent in managing their resources. We first reveal new findings from our own Android user experiment: (i) the launching probabilities of applications follow Zipf's law, and (ii) inter-running and running times of applications conform to log-normal distributions. We also find context-dependency in application usage patterns, for which we classify contexts in a personalized manner with unsupervised learning methods. Using the knowledge acquired, we develop a novel context-aware application scheduling framework, CAS that adaptively unloads and preloads background applications in a timely manner. Our trace-driven simulations with 96 user traces demonstrate the benefits of CAS over existing algorithms. We also verify the practicality of CAS by implementing it on the Android platform.