Analyzing Mobile Application Software Power Consumption via Model-driven Engineering

Smartphones are mobile devices that travel with their owners and provide increasingly powerful services. The software implementing these services must conserve battery power since smartphones may operate for days without being recharged. It is hard, however, to design smartphone software that minimizes power consumption. For example, multiple layers of abstractions and middleware sit between an application and the hardware, which make it hard to predict the power consumption of a potential application design accurately. Application developers must therefore wait until after implementation (when changes are more expensive) to determine the power consumption characteristics of a design. This paper provides three contributions to the study of applying model-driven engineering to analyze power consumption early in the lifecycle of smartphone applications. First, it presents a model-driven methodology for accurately emulating the power consumption of smartphone application architectures. Second, it describes the System Power Optimization Tool (SPOT), which is a model-driven tool that automates power consumption emulation code generation and simplifies analysis. Third, it empirically demonstrates how SPOT can estimate power consumption to within ∼3-4% of actual power consumption for representative smartphone applications.