Mobile Gaming Experience: An Approach Based on Thread Scheduler & Thread Priority Manager

While the primary purpose of a smartphone is not necessarily to play games, smartphone gaming is becoming increasingly popular, resulting in the advancement of technology to support a flawless gaming experience. Market research forecast indicates that by the end of 2025 mobile gaming applications download will account for almost one-third of the overall mobile apps download globally. However, as the majority of smartphone models are not specifically designed and built for the purpose of gaming, graphics-intensive gaming applications deliver a poor user experience, especially in the performance area. Hence, due to the fierce competition in the smartphone industry, companies are engaging in the research & development of various technical Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for example, median Frames per Second (FPS), FPS-stability & Phone Surface Temperature (PST) - which are becoming driving factors for gamers to decide on the purchase of a right smartphone. Our system-level research and analysis in the area of performance resulted in concluding on two major reasons behind poor user experience - a lack of efficient technique (i) to schedule threads based on computational need and (ii) to adjust thread priority based on thread-behaviour. We have used a novel machine learning algorithm on the scheduler and priority manager based on our system level analysis in order to deliver to smooth user experience. Experimental results with popular android games on a commercial gaming platform show an average 18% improvement (FPS) and efficient performance or performance core utilization compared to the default approach.