Towards energy aware object-oriented development of android applications

Abstract

Energy consumption has become a concern for developers due to the increasing complexity of applications that are to run on devices with limited battery power. Developers want to develop energy efficient applications however existing tools do not bridge the gap between understanding where energy is consumed and suggesting how the code can be modified in order to reduce energy consumption. A generalized method to relate software structure with its energy consumption is hence desirable. Previous attempts to relate change in object-oriented structure to its effects on energy consumption have been inconclusive. In this paper, we proposed a methodology to relate software structural information represented as metrics to energy consumption. Employing our methodology we empirically validated three Object Oriented (OO) metric suites; the Abreus Metrics (MOOD), Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) metrics and Martin's package metric suite and determine their relationship with energy consumption. Our results show that software structural metrics can be reliably related to energy consumption behavior of programs using a total of 63 releases from seven open-source iteratively developed android applications.