Future of Mobile Software for Smartphones and Drones: Energy and Performance

The need for performance and energy efficiency in mobile devices is apparent with the obvious shifting of more intensive computation to mobile platforms. In this paper, we first make a clear distinction between performance and energy issues. Apart from showing that performance efficiency is neither co-related with energy-efficiency nor inefficiency, we focus on programming methodologies and software validation approaches for producing energy efficient mobile software. These include reviewing recent works on energy-aware programming and nonfunctional testing to expose energy and performance issues in mobile software. As mobile platforms continue to evolve, new scenarios and use-cases involving mobile devices are on the rise. We speculate on scenarios involving energy hungry mobile software in near future, and how existing software engineering techniques can evolve to combat energy inefficiency in such scenarios. These include the need to effectively manage the energy-consumption of software-controlled personal drones which are likely to become main-stream in near future. We suggest integration of concepts from price theory in Economics to build a distributed energy management framework for software-controlled personal drones.