Application power consumption estimation considering software dependency in Android

Abstract

Android operating system has become one of the most popular smartphone platforms. One report stated that the most important issue of smartphones was its power consumption. Android has a function with which an application can be invoked in screen-off state without user's operation. Some applications frequently work in screen-off state, heavily and consume battery. For saving power consumption in the state, accurate estimation of power consumption of each application is important. However, estimating power consumption cannot be easily achieved because of its dependency on device. That is, application's power consumption varies on installed application and type of hardware module in the device, which can be called software and hardware dependency, respectively. In this paper, we discuss estimation of power consumption in screen-off state considering software dependency. First, we explain software dependency of power consumption. Second, we propose a method, which takes account of software dependency, for estimating power consumption due to GPS. The proposed method monitors GPS utilization individually. Third, we evaluate our method with a benchmark and practical applications using GPS. We then demonstrate that our method can estimate power consumption of each application and suitably predict consumption after uninstalling an application without uninstallation.