A systematic review on techniques and approaches to estimate mobile software energy consumption

Developing green and sustainable software has become a prominent topic in research over the last years. While approaches are being constantly researched and developed to estimate and in turn optimize the energy consumption of software applications, there is still a lack of knowledge amongst practitioners how to address energy consumption as an important non-functional quality aspect and in turn develop sustainable software. By providing a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art in mobile software energy consumption, we want to examine how research has contributed to fill this gap in knowledge over the last decade, by providing the foundations to estimate mobile software energy consumption. Therefore, we categorize available work amongst the approach taken to profile energy consumption, the individual contributions and the intended platform of use. Furthermore, we examine the availability of tools and frameworks for research and practice. The foundation for this review is a systematically collected selection of 134 studies published in between 2011 till 2021. From the data synthesized from the selected studies, we discuss key observations and future ongoing challenges in mobile software, energy consumption profiling. Furthermore, we believe that the key for a broad adoption is a common terminology. Henceforth, we propose an ontology describing mobile software energy consumption profiling from the results obtained in the presented review.