A Methodology for Relating Software Structure with Energy Consumption

Abstract

With the widespread use of mobile devices relying on limited battery power, the burden of optimizing applications for energy has shifted towards the application developers. In their quest to develop energy efficient applications, developers face the hurdle of measuring the effect of software change on energy consumption. A naive solution to this problem would be to have an exhaustive suite of test cases that are executed upon every change to measure their effect on energy consumption. This method is inefficient and also suffers from environment dependent inconsistencies. A more generalized method would be to relate software structural metrics with its energy consumption behavior. Previous attempts to relate change in objectoriented metrics to their effects on energy consumption have been inconclusive. We observe that structural information is global and executed tests are rarely comprehensive in their coverage, this approach is prone to errors. In this paper, we present a methodology to relate software energy consumption with software structural metrics considering the test case execution traces. Furthermore, we demonstrate that software structural metrics can be reliably related to energy consumption behavior of programs using several versions of three open-source iteratively developed android applications. We discover that by using our approach we are able to identify strong correlations between several software metrics and energy consumption behavior.