Collaborative Energy Debugging for Mobile Devices

We aim to detect and diagnose code misbehavior that wastes energy, which we call energy bugs. This paper describes a method and implementation, called Carat, for performing such diagnosis on mobile devices. Carat takes a collaborative, black-box approach. A noninvasive client app sends intermittent, coarse-grained measurements to a server, which identifies correlations between higher expected energy use and client properties like the running apps, device model, and operating system. Carat successfully detected all energy bugs in a controlled experiment and, during a deployment to 883 users, identified 5434 instances of apps exhibiting buggy behavior in the wild.