ANEPROF: Energy Profiling for Android Java Virtual Machine and Applications

Battery energy is one of the most critical resources in a handheld device. Modern designs for handheld devices thus call for optimized use of system power. To develop power-efficient systems, it is essential to understand how power is consumed throughout the system. A promising approach is to measure the power consumption of the system and then match the measurements with the profiled system events. The latter then provides information about how the system consumes power. However, existing tools mostly profile only at the process level due to problems such as profiling overhead and event synchronization. Modern handheld systems, such as Android, complicate the problem further because of the extra layers of software such as Java runtime environment and libraries. To address the above challenges, this paper presents ANEPROF, Android Energy Profiler - a profiling tool for Android that allows energy profiling down to the function level. The design issues and considerations are discussed and its implementation is described. The performance of the tool is evaluated by comparing with other profiling methods.