Towards power profiling of Android permissions

As the popularity of smart phones and tablets grow, the battery life of these devices is becoming an important issue. The Android OS uses permissions to control access to software and hardware components of the device. Therefore, depending on the combination of permissions allowed by the user, a different set of hardware components will be used and hence a particular device may experience different battery consumption patterns depending on the set of allowed permissions. In this position paper we provide a preliminary experimental evaluation of the relation between some popular Android permissions and battery consumption by the device while these permissions are allowed. While battery consumption is an issue in different platforms, we chose to study this on Android because of the user's involvement in the Android permission model. We are hoping that these results will be the basis of further investigation into battery usage profiling of different Android applications based on the analysis of their permission requests and usage.