Crowdsensing-based smartphone use guide for battery life extension

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of smartphones, battery life is among the most crucial issues for mobile users. This paper presents a crowdsensing-based use guide to extend the lifetime of smartphones. The system answers a question raised by phone usage: Why is my phone battery draining quickly compared to others phones despite running the same applications? The proposed system pinpoints the major causes of battery drain in terms of both hardware and software aspects. In relation to the hardware aspect, the system quantifies degree of battery aging as a ratio metric; an estimate of 50% indicates that the battery is at half of full capacity, meaning that battery usage time is approximately half that of a new battery. The system automatically profiles battery age based on charging duration data collected by crowdsensing. In its software aspect, the system guides phone configuration to extend application usage times. The system mines large-scale usage data to infer the major energy holes in a user's phone usage. The scheme works autonomously without user intervention and does not require any external equipment. Extensive evaluation with 3,000 users demonstrated that the proposed scheme successfully extends battery life for typical mobile users.