In disk-based storage systems, non-volatile write caches have been widely used to reduce write latency as well as to ensure data consistency at the level of a storage controller. Write cache policies should basically consider which data is important to cache and evict, and they should also take into account the real I/O features of a non-volatile device. However, existing work has mainly focused on improving basic cache operations, but has not considered the I/O cost of a non-volatile device properly. In this paper, we propose a pattern-aware write cache policy, PAW for a NAND flash memory in disk-based mobile storage systems. PAW is designed to face a mix of a number of sequential accesses and fewer non-sequential ones in mobile storage systems by redirecting the latter to a NAND flash memory and the former to a disk. In addition, PAW employs the synergistic effect of combining a pattern-aware write cache policy and an I/O clustering-based queuing method to strengthen the sequentiality with the aim of reducing the overall system I/O latency. For evaluations, we have built a practical hard disk simulator with a non-volatile cache of a NAND flash memory. Experimental results show that our policy significantly improves the overall I/O performance by reducing the overhead from a non-volatile cache considerably over a traditional one, achieving a high efficiency in energy consumption.

Backlight dimming techniques have been researched much to obtain high power saving on display modules, especially those which are based on LCD. The use of LED as a light source in a backlight module has opened a wider chance to perform local dimming as an improvement of a conservative global dimming approach. However, local dimming techniques are sometimes observed to obtain worse performance than global dimming ones in terms of power saving or image fidelity. We observed that even some of their results show visible artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel backlight dimming technique called hybrid dimming, which combines local and global dimming approaches effectively. We do local dimming to obtain the initial backlight levels while calculating its SSIM index, which is a human visual system-aware image quality metric. We then make sure that these backlight levels don't exceed the ones obtained from a human visual system-aware global dimming with similar image fidelity. As a result, our proposed method can gain better power saving than a human visual system-aware global dimming and prior local dimming techniques, while making little difference in the image fidelity and suppressing visible block artifacts in the results. Experimental results showed that the proposed technique can achieve up to 14, 2.2, and 2.4 times higher power saving ratio than human visual system-aware global dimming and two well-designed local dimming techniques, respectively.