GreenDroid: A tool for analysing power consumption in the android ecosystem

Abstract

This paper presents GreenDroid, a tool for monitoring and analyzing power consumption for the Android ecosystem. This tool instruments the source code of a giving Android application and is able to estimate the power consumed when running it. Moreover, it uses advanced classification algorithms to detect abnormal power consumption and to relate them to fragments in the source code. A set of graphical results are produced that help software developers to identify abnormal power consumption in their source code. This growing awareness on energy efficiency is also changing the way programmers develop their software. As shown by recent empirical studies [1], software developers are more and more concerned on developing energy efficient software. Unfortunately, developing energy-aware software is still a difficult task. While the programming language community has developed advanced and widely-used software tools, such us debuggers and fault localization tools [2], memory profiler tools [3], [4], testing tools [5], [6], [7], benchmark and runtime monitoring frameworks [8], compiler optimizations [9], etc there are no equivalent tools/frameworks to profile/optimize power consumption. This paper presents a software tool, named GreenDroid 1 , for monitoring and analyzing power consumption for the Android ecosystem, one of the largest software ecosystems for mobile devices. This tool uses a power consumption model This work is financed by the FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project UID/EEA/50014/2013.

Power Consumption Analysis, Measurement, Management, and Issues: A State-of-the-Art Review of Smartphone Battery and Energy Usage

“…Couto et al [312] presented a tool named GreenDroid 4 that can estimate the power consumption of Android-based mobile devices. It also has the capability to identify abnormal power consumption in an application's source code by parsing of Android/Java programs and constructs an AST.…”

Towards Energy-Aware Coding Practices for Android

“…Motivated by this, several research works focused on providing information about the energy consumption of applications. Some of them were able to monitor the consumption per application [4,7,27,28], or even compare different usages of similar applications [6], while others tried to determine the energy consumed by blocks of code, such as methods [2,3], lines of code [9] or even bytecode instructions [5].…”

Measuring Energy Efficiency of Selected Working Software

“…This growing concern on energy efficiency may also be associated with the perspective of software developers. Unfortunately, developing energy-aware software [3] is still a difficult task. While programming languages provide several compiler optimizations [14], memory profiler tools, benchmark [10,12] and time execution monitoring frameworks, there are no equivalent tools and frameworks to optimize energy consumption [8].…”