A Software-based Approach for Source-line Level Energy Estimates and Hardware Usage Accounting on Android

Alexandre Cornet and Anandha Gopalan



Abstract:

As users rely more on their mobile devices, energy inefficient software is a real threat to user experience. Early tools for developers focussed on expensive power measurement hardware and software-based approaches were introduced to relieve them of such requirements. These tools highlighted the most energy-inefficient parts of the code, but the developer still had to find and understand the exact causes of energy drain. Also, there was no mapping of hardware energy activity to code and no accounting for tail energy. To this end, this work focusses on providing source-line level energy estimates and maps the drain caused by Wi-Fi back to the code while accounting for tail-energy.