Detecting Anomalous Energy Consumption in Android Applications – Marco Couto, Tiago Carção, Jácome Cunha, João Paulo Fernandes, João Saraiva

The use of powerful mobile devices, like smartphones, tablets and laptops, are changing the way programmers develop software. While in the past the primary goal to optimize software was the run time optimization, nowadays there is a growing awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption. This paper presents a technique and a tool to detect anomalous energy consumption in Android applications, and to relate it directly with the source code of the application. We propose a dynamically calibrated model for energy consumption for the Android ecosystem, and that supports different devices. The model is then used as an API to monitor the application execution: first, we instrument the application source code so that we can relate energy consumption to the application source code; second, we use a statistical approach, based on fault-localization techniques, to localize abnormal energy consumption in the source code.

Programming Languages, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014 [PDF] [Presentation] [Bib]