Empirical Evaluation of Energy Consumption for Mobile Applications

The study of software energy consumption is gaining more importance due to the wildly increasing use of resource limited portable devices that run on batteries, in addition to the economical and environmental concerns. Mobile hardware has been mostly well optimized on their energy consumption, but that cannot be said for mobile applications. Studying the energy consumption of applications requires investigating the amount of energy consumed at a granule level (e.g., method calls), and therefore, identifying the leaks which are responsible for peaks in energy consumed by an application. In this paper, we performed an empirical measurement of energy consumption for 10 Android applications using a software-based tool called PETRA. We reported and compared the energy consumed by method calls by the test cases. The study reveals that there are clear variations on the average energy consumption in the studied applications and are ranging from 0.25 Joule/second to 1.25 Joule/second. Moreover, the study revealed that the relative high average energy consumption in is associated with some frequently called methods by the test cases. These methods are identified and reported as energy hotspots. These findings could help practitioners to minimize the energy pattern by applying refactoring techniques during software maintenance.