Mobile Application Device Power Usage Measurements

Published

July 31, 2012

Author(s)

Rahul Murmuria, Jeffrey Medsger, Angelos Stavrou, Jeff Voas

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.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the IEEE's Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE'12)

Conference Dates

June 20-22, 2012

Conference Location

Gaithersburg, MD, US

Conference Title

2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE'12)

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/SERE.2012.19

Local Download

Keywords

smartphones, app power measurement, malicious app behavior

Citation

Murmuria, R. , Medsger, J. , Stavrou, A. and Voas, J. (2012), Mobile Application Device Power Usage Measurements, Proceedings of the IEEE's Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE'12), Gaithersburg, MD, US, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/SERE.2012.19, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=911099 (Accessed September 18, 2025)