Understanding the Characteristics of Android Wear OS

Abstract

Interactive wearable devices bring dramatic changes to apps and hardware, leaving operating system (OS) design in the mist. To this end, we thoroughly examine the execution efficiency of Android Wear, a popular wearable OS. By running a suite of fifteen benchmarks, we profile four system aspects: CPU usage, idle episodes, thread-level parallelism, and microarchitectural behaviors. We present the discovered inefficiencies and their root causes, together with a series of widespread, yet unknown OS design flaws. Towards designing future wearable OSes, our study has yielded a generic lesson, key insights, and specific action items.