Lightweight Method-Level Energy Consumption Estimation for Android Applications

The energy consumption problem is a hot topic in Android communities. The high energy cost caused by improper development brings lots of complaints from users. An effective and efficient energy consumption analysis technique can guide the developers to improve the energy efficiency of their apps. Existing researches on this problem focus on either system entity level that gives the energy consumption of the hardware, or source line level that calculates the energy cost of source codes. With the consideration of accuracy and cost of analysis, this paper proposes a lightweight and automatic approach to estimate the method-level energy consumption for Android apps. We construct a statistical model from a set of energy values obtained by Dalvik bytecode based instrumentation and software-based measurement, to predict the energy consumption of execution sequences of methods. The experiments on several real-world apps show that the proposed techniques have low overhead while persisting acceptable accuracy.