Mobile Application and Device Power Usage Measurements

Abstract

Reducing power consumption has become a crucial design tenet for both mobile and other small computing devices that are not constantly connected to a power source. However, unlike devices that have a limited and predefined set of functionality, recent mobile smart phone devices have a very rich set of components and can handle multiple general purpose programs that are not a-priori known or profiled. In this paper, we present a general methodology for collecting measurements and modelling power usage on smart phones. Our goal is to characterize the device subsystems and perform accurate power measurements. We implemented a system that effectively accounts for the power usage of all of the primary hardware subsystems on the phone: CPU, display, graphics, GPS, audio, microphone, and Wi-Fi. To achieve that, we make use of the per-subsystem time shares reported by the operating system's power-management module. We present the models capability to further calculate the power consumption of individual applications given measurements, and also the feasibility of our model to operate in real-time and without significant impact in the power footprint of the devices we monitor.