E-Android: A New Energy Profiling Tool for Smartphones

Abstract

As the limited battery lifetime remains a major factor restricting the applicability of a smartphone, significant research efforts have been devoted to understand the energy consumption in smartphones. Existing energy modeling methods can account energy drain in a fine-grained manner and provide well designed human-battery interfaces for users to characterize energy usage of every app in smartphones. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that there are still pitfalls in current Android energy modeling approaches, leaving collateral energy consumption unaccounted. The existence of collateral energy consumption becomes a serious energy bug. In particular, those energy bugs could be exploited to launch a new class of energy attacks, which deplete battery life and sidestep the supervision of current energy accounting. To unveil collateral energy bugs, we propose E-Android to accurately profile energy consumption of a smartphone in a comprehensive manner. E-Android monitors collateral energy related events and maintains energy consumption maps for relevant apps. We evaluate the effectiveness of E-Android under six different collateral energy attacks and two normal scenarios, and compare the results with those of Android. While Android fails to disclose collateral energy bugs, E-Android can accurately profile energy consumption and reveal the existence of energy bugs with minor overhead.