What is eating up battery life on my SmartPhone: A case study

Abstract

Smartphones emerged as the new necessary gadget to many. A smartphone can combine some or all functionalities of several other devices such as a personal computer, phone, personal game console, music player, radio, and/or GPS. Unlike most of the above listed technologies which are switched ON on a need-to basis, a smartphone is always ON. Since a smartphone can run background tasks even during idle mode and since it is limited by its battery life, it becomes necessary to understand what really happens in the background and how it affects the battery life and consequently how to improve it. To this end, we analyzed two smartphone platforms specifically looking at how the energy consumption varies depending on the background applications and network connection type. For instance, we show that you can increase the energy efficiency of an iPhone by up to 59% when streaming music on Wi-Fi as opposed to 3G. Also, when the phone is using 3G, we show that network applications running in the background can reduce the energy efficiency of an iPhone by up to 72% when compared to real idle state. Our observation sheds light on what is eating up the battery life of a smartphone and led us to provide optimization techniques to increase the battery life.