Collaborative Research: CSR: Small: Systems Support for a Sustainable Smartphone Ecosystem

This project improves the sustainability of the smartphone ecosystem. Smartphones have fundamentally changed the modern world, but their manufacturing, use, and disposal have also caused grave concern about sustainability, thanks to the unprecedented scale of their usage today. The project’s novelty is devising new sustainability-aware software for the smartphone ecosystem. The project’s broader significance and importance are the extension of smartphone usage lifetimes, the mitigation of the environmental impact of aging smartphones, and the introduction of sustainable computing as a new topic into existing Computer Science curriculum at the SUNY at Binghamton and at the University of Virginia. This project comprises three research thrusts: (1) a new operating system principal that continuously measures, accounts for, and rewards the sustainability impact of software activities; (2) new runtime systems that identify, circumvent, and survive software activities that may cause erratic shutdowns with aging batteries; and (3) cross-stack system designs that repurpose legacy smartphones for application-specific uses, and assemble multiple broken smartphones with complementary hardware. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.