Reducing the Energy Consumption of Mobile Applications Behind the Scenes

As energy efficiency has become a key consideration in the engineering of mobile applications, an increasing number of perfective maintenance tasks are concerned with optimizing energy consumption. However, optimizing a mobile application to reduce its energy consumption is non-trivial due to the highly volatile nature of mobile execution environments. Mobile applications commonly run on a variety of mobile devices over mobile networks with divergent characteristics. Therefore, no single, static energy consumption optimization is likely to yield across-the-board benefits, and may even turn to be detrimental in some scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach to perfective maintenance of mobile applications to reduce their energy consumption. The maintenance programmer declaratively specifies the suspected energy consumption hotspots in a mobile application. Based on this input, our approach then automatically transforms the application to enable it to offload parts of its functionality to the cloud. The offloading is highly adaptive, being driven by a runtime system that dynamically determines both the state-to-offload and its transfer mechanism based on the execution environment in place. In addition, the runtime system continuously improves its effectiveness due to a feedback-loop mechanism. Thus, our approach flexibly reduces the energy consumption of mobile applications behind the scenes. Applying our approach to third- party Android applications has shown that it can effectively reduce the overall amount of energy consumed by these applications, with the actual numbers ranging between 25% and 50%. These results indicate that our approach represents a promising direction in developing pragmatic and systematic tools for the perfective maintenance of mobile applications.