The hardware and software aspects of energy consumption in the mobile development platform

PurposeThe set of services provided by the mobile phone platform, is becoming increasingly complex and requiring more computing power, hence higher energy consumption, and compromising the autonomy of these devices. The purpose of this paper is to identify scenarios where methods could be applied to reduce such consumption and extend the mobile autonomy.Design/methodology/approachThis mobile evolution has given rise to a lot of energy saving research activities, which mainly focus on the hardware side of computational systems. However, it is tempting to suppose that only hardware dissipates power, not software. This paper characterizes several hardware and software scenarios, which could be explored to develop energy‐efficient mobile techniques.FindingsFrom this analysis, the authors argue that the development of applications that consider energy saving as one of their requirements, can result in a significant final energy saving because solutions will be part of their own software and they do not depend on external resources to obtain a lower consumption.Originality/valueThis paper provides a broad analysis about the different research directions in energy consumption optimization and stresses the important contributions that the software engineering area could offer to this subject.