Energy-Efficient Data Access for Pervasive Computing

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Energy-efficiency is vital for pervasive computing. Small, mobilecomputers such as handhelds are battery powered. They must carefullymanage their limited energy supply in order to run demandingapplications for long periods of time. Pervasive computers are alsoincreasingly well-connected to the Internet by wireless networks.However, connectivity is costly: communication is a large and growingportion of their power budgets. Current data access mechanismsexacerbate the problem---they substantially increase the energy costof communication because they are optimized for performance, notenergy-efficiency.This research investigates how to build energy-efficient distributedfile systems for pervasive computing. The first step is buildingmeasurement infrastructure that precisely captures the communication,storage, and computation costs of data access. The next step ischaracterizing the energy usage of existing distributed file systemsand identifying characteristics that increase energy-efficiency. Thefinal step is building a new, energy-efficient file system thatenables pervasive computers to maintain connectivity withoutcompromising battery lifetime. This research thus allows pervasivecomputing devices to be incorporated into everyday activities. Forexample, all-day battery life is essential for projects that deeplyintegrate handheld computers into classroom activity.