Orka: A new technique to profile the energy usage of
Android applications
Benjamin Westfield and Anandha Gopalan
Abstract:
The ever increasing complexity of mobile devices has opened new,
exciting possibilities to both designers of applications and their end
users. However, this technological improvement comes with an increase in
power consumption, a drain that battery technology has not managed to
keep up with. Due to this, application developers are now facing a new
optimisation challenge not present for traditional software: minimising
energy usage. Developers need guidance to help reduce energy usage while
not compromising on the features of their application. Despite research
identifying areas of code consuming high energy, developers currently
don't possess the necessary tools to make judgements on their
application's design based on this. This paper presents Orka, a new tool
that analyses an Android application and provides feedback on exactly
where the application is expanding energy, thus enabling developers to
improve its energy-efficiency. Orka profiles an application using
user-defined test cases, code injection techniques and bytecode
analysis. Feedback provided is the energy usage at the method level as
well as any consumption due to hardware used. Moreover, to be useful
over the entire development life-cycle, this feedback is compared with
feedback from previous versions of the application so as to monitor and
improve the energy usage.