On death, taxes, and sleep disorder bugs in smartphones

According to Benjamin Franklin, life holds but two certainties, death and taxes. As we enter the mobile era, the primary mobile device, i.e., the smartphone, faces the certainties of adopting agressive sleeping polices to conserve battery energy, requiring programmers to use explicit power control APIs to keep the SOC/CPU on, and a third certainty that unavoidably rises from these: sleep disorder bugs. In this paper, we articulate the fate and destiny of smartphone apps, sleep disorder bugs, as a critical technical challenge in the mobile era. We then present a taxonomy of sleep disorder bugs, and a categorization of time-critical sections which are the root cause of sleep disorders, in apps, framework services and the Android kernel. Finally, we present a unified system for detecting the spectrum of sleep disorder bugs.