Power behavior analysis of mobile applications using Bugu

• Design and implement an application level of power profiler and analyzer: Bugu.
• Bugu can benefit three groups of users: end users, application developers and system developers.
• We analyze 100 applications power information and observe several interesting phenomena that can improve application and system energy-efficient design.
• We discuss two fundamental issues exist in the application power profiling field.

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have become an integral part of our daily life. However, the battery drain problem always bothers us. To understand this problem, we design and implement the Bugu service which aims to analyzing power and event information and providing users with detailed energy behaviors of applications. We analyzed 100 popular applications’ power behavior using Bugu on different platforms. The results showed several interesting observations, including radio service and hardware interrupts, that indicate the potential energy optimization for both applications and systems. We further revealed the underlying reason of different power consumption for several applications in case studies. For example, the low efficient usage of system service in iHeartRadio. Finally, lessons learned from software-based power profiling and the ground truth of application level power consumption is discussed.