Symbian Development Contest on Mobile Device Energy Spending

We welcome everyone to take a part in a new FRUCT R&D challenge in the field of Energy and Power Management. The contest target is to develop Symbian software which maximizes energy consumption of a mobile device. The main idea of this contest is to better understand:

• what are the most energy-consuming components and what are the ways to use them;
• what are the programming modules and design patterns that consumes most power;
• how to simultaneously use maximum number of embedded physical elements of a smartphone.

The target of spending the maximum amount of energy may sound odd but in this way we hope to enhance understanding of energy consuming operations and look at battery consumption from a completely different perspective. The contest application can do whatever, doesn’t need good UI, so this approach will allow to really focus on energy-consumption.

The contest winner will be awarded by FRUCT diploma, invitation to present the winner solution at one of the following FRUCT events (the winner will get a choice of at least 3 options) and Nokia N95 8Gb smartphone device.

The contest rules:

1. The contest programs will be executed at Nokia N95 8Gb, Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97. The result energy performance will be calculated as an arithmetic mean of the best two tests, i.e. if test will run only on Nokia N95 8GB, the reported result will be based only on one measurement.
2. The contest solutions should be regular Symbian applications that can do anything (functionality doesn’t matter as long as it consumes a lot of energy), but they must be installed to the phone by using normal application installation procedures.
3. The energy measurements will be carried out by Nokia Energy Profiler (NEP), which will be provided on request to all contest participants for local testing. Everything is simple - the solution which has the highest average power consumption according to the NEP measurement is the winner.
4. The measurement has to be carried out in the following way. First, the competition software is started and immediately after it NEP is started. After 4 minutes the measurement is stopped. It is not allowed to touch the device during the period of measurement.
5. The contest application can initiate as many external connections as it can, but it is not allowed to have external connections, which were not initiated by the application.
6. The result of one power measurement is taken as an average power in NEP trace over two minutes interval [for 1st and 3rd minutes]. As said in (1), the final measurement will be counted as the top two scores from measurements on the official contest devices.
7. Please note that it is absolutely forbidden to make hardware modification and low level (assembler) hacking! Only regular Symbian applications will be accepted to the contest.
8. The contest application should be sent to info<at>fruct.org and contain the following:
   a. Installable version of the application (it is allowed to have different installation files for different models of contest devices).
   b. One-page description of the applied approach to maximize energy spending and how it is implemented.
   c. Symbian source code of the contest application.
9. The contest start at the date of publication of this document and the submissions are accepted till 23.59, December 12 (Helsinki time). The contest result will be published on December 22.

To learn more about the contest we welcome you to attend the special talk “Monitoring of mobile devices energy consumption & Contest rules” that will be given by Gerard Bosch from Nokia Research Center, Helsinki lab. The presentation time is 13:45, in room 2310 of the main building of Lappeenranta University of Technology (in the final part of the “Official Opening of 8th FRUCT conference” session). Also after the 8th FRUCT conference the presentation materials will be published at FRUCT web site.

MAKE THE MOST POWER CONSUMING APPLICATION AND WIN!