Efficient Energy Consumption's Measurement on Android Devices

Abstract

Modern mobile software and hardware is dominated by a paradox: while devices become smaller and services more resource- and energy-demanding, batteries almost maintain size and power. Among them, the multimedia applications consume the most of battery power. By measuring the battery charging level and efficiently estimating the remaining operational time of a portable device, reasonable usage of the device can be advised or appropriate adaptations to be activated. With respect to the measurement of energy consumption, a lot of research has been carried out recently. Most include the setup of a small "in situ" test-bed for conducting measurements via specific power instruments to monitor, gather, measure and analyze usage statistics and battery discharging. In this paper we describe a simple application we have developed using the Android API to collect data for the device's battery. The application logs the charging level of the battery upon the time for future processing. The accuracy of our application has been verified by a small test-bed we set up using an external power measurement tool. Finally, using this application we conducted measurements to estimate the impact of display's brightness and browser's cache on the consumed energy by a web 3D animation. The 3D animation was developed using X3Dom, which provides a cross platform, browser friendly and HTML5 compatible 3D scene.