Augmented reality (AR) and radio-frequency (RF)
sensing pipelines demand high frame rates and continuous
inference on mobile hardware. These workloads saturate the
CPU/GPU, causing excessive heat, elevated power draw and
eventual thermal throttling, which in turn collapse situational
awareness (SA) in safety-critical missions. Dynamic voltage and
frequency scaling (DVFS) is a well-known technique that adjusts
voltage–frequency levels at runtime to reduce heat generation
and power consumption [1]. However, conventional DVFS governors are application-agnostic and often fail to prevent thermal
throttling on mobile devices [1]. Moreover, virtual and augmented
reality tasks can push smartphone components past their thermal
design power by 20–80 % and raise CPU/GPU temperatures
beyond 70 ◦C, leading to degraded performance and discomfort
[2].
This paper introduces ThermoGuard, a power–thermal control
framework tailored for AR RF operations on wearables. ThermoGuard combines application-aware DVFS with an overlay throttling module that dynamically reduces the density of rendered
overlays to maintain mission utility while staying within thermal
budgets. Through step-load and hot-ambient experiments, we
show that ThermoGuard prevents thermal throttling on Jetson
Xavier NX and Pixel-8 hardware, sustaining median SA latencies
under 50 ms at <1W while CPU temperatures remain below
70 ◦C. Compared with baseline governors, ThermoGuard improves end-to-end utility by 27 % under sustained high loads.
