Decomposing power measurements for mobile devices

Abstract

Modern mobile phones are an appealing platform for pervasive computing applications. However, the complexity of these devices makes it difficult for developers to understand the power consumption of their applications. Our measurement framework is the first we have seen which can produce fine-grained, annotated traces of a phone's power consumption and is designed to develop an understanding of how particular aspects of an application drive energy use. We are using our framework to analyse the power consumption of Android-based G1 and Magic handsets and show that particular choices of message size and send buffer can alter the energy required to send data by an order of magnitude in certain cases.