SmartOS: An Activity-Centric Architecture for Energy-Aware Smartphone Operating Systems

Smartphones integrate diverse hardware and software components that cooperate to accomplish user activities under stringent energy constraints. Conventional operating systems organize computation primarily around processes, threads, and resource management, which may not fully expose the dependencies and energy trade-offs associated with complete user activities. This concept note introduces SmartOS, an activity-centric architectural proposal for energy-aware smartphone operating systems. It explores representing activities through four candidate computational primitives: ACQUIRE, TRANSFORM, PRESERVE, and DELIVER. These primitives are intended to express recurring computational patterns while exposing dependencies, execution alternatives, and quality-of-service requirements. The proposed architecture investigates whether coordinating operations at the activity level can create energy-optimization opportunities beyond those available through resource-level decisions alone. Photography, voice messaging, phone calls, and turn-by-turn navigation illustrate the potential scope of the model. The note formulates research questions concerning primitive expressiveness, energy optimization, execution coordination, and implementation overhead. It also outlines a staged evaluation strategy involving formalization, simulation, prototyping, and comparative experiments. The proposal establishes a research direction whose effectiveness remains to be determined through systematic investigation.