Where Has My Battery Gone?: A Novel Crowdsourced Solution for Characterizing Energy Consumption

The increased complexity of smartphone applications, and the increasing number of system settings affecting these applications, has made it difficult to understand and optimize battery use. This article summarizes the authors' recent work on developing a novel crowdsourced solution for characterizing energy consumption of system settings, subsystem variables, and other context factors. Their technique can simultaneously capture relationships between multiple factors, such as software subsystems and system settings, and provide a unified view of the energy state of a mobile device. They demonstrate the benefits of their approach by analyzing a large-scale crowdsourced dataset. Results of their analysis reveal new insights into battery consumption.