Energy Consumption Measurements as a Basis for Computational Offloading for Android Smartphones

Computational offloading has been shown being a promising approach to prolong the battery life of smartphones. To come up with energy-efficient offloading strategies, it is crucial to understand how much energy is used not only for local computation but also for network communication. Therefore, reliable methods to measure the energy consumption of the phones are needed as a fundamental basis. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the Android smart battery interface. As a second contribution, we also designed a new, portable and cheap microcontroller-based power monitoring device. We conduct energy measurement experiments for a set of typical applications including local computations as well as WiFi and 3G operations. Our results show that both our device and smart battery interface can be used to estimate the energy consumed by the applications running on the phone. The smart battery interface, however, clearly underestimates in idle status. We see our measurements as an important step towards the development of more accurate offloading strategies for smartphones.