Provisioning of power event APIs as a mobile OS facility

Monitoring various hardware and software events for energy consumption is essential for energy management in mobile devices. However, current mobile operating systems (OS) lack monitoring functionality and do not provide sufficient information of this kind. In this paper, we propose PEMOS (Power Events Monitor for Mobile Operating Systems), a framework for power event APIs for mobile devices, that provides a wide spectrum of energy-related information, enabling in-depth analysis of energy problems. PEMOS provides a set of well-defined APIs as a mobile OS facility, defining various energy-related system events as power events. These are classified into system events and application events, encompassing extensive and fine-grained power-related events. Benefits of PEMOS include extensive coverage of power events, high portability across various platforms, and efficient API implementation. The framework structure is portable across multiple devices, and the standard ioctl-based API implementation enables the same operations on different devices without system modification. We implemented PEMOS on the Android platform to evaluate its efficacy and usefulness. The experimental results and case studies confirm that PEMOS is effective and useful for a range of energy management systems, with minimal overhead.