Multi-architecture profiler for Android

Abstract

Performance and energy consumption are well-known constraints of modern embedded systems, thus, application analysis in early stages of the development cycle is mandatory. However, the few available tools to evaluate the behaviour of an application considering different architectures are not able to provide a complete solution for this task. In this context, this work presents a multi-architecture profiling tool for Android applications, which fully supports ARM, MIPS, and x86 architectures. It provides a wide range of information per application, including energy consumption, execution time and other statistics. For that, we have extended the Android Emulator QEMU and developed post-processing tools. As case study, we have compared different architectures in terms of performance and energy consumption. By the use of the proposed tool, we show that, given a fixed energy budget, a different amount of applications can be executed depending on how they were implemented, which varies according to the processor.