Improving Android Performance and Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Mobile devices and embedded devices need more processing power but energy consumption should be less to save battery power. Google has released an open source platform Android for mobile devices. Android uses new power management framework to save power in mobile devices. Android developers are allowed to build only JAVA applications. In this work, we present benefits of using Android in low power embedded devices. We compared Android JAVA performance with popular Sun embedded JVM running on top of Angstrom linux. Our work shows that Android can be made more energy efficient by improving performance of JAVA applications. We developed a JAVA DSP framework which allows Android JAVA applications to use both ARM & DSP parallely and thus improves performance. We also showed, Android can be made more energy efficient by using our developed framework.