When to Schedule an Application? An Energy-Aware Decision

Abstract

Making mobile applications energy efficient immensely builds user satisfaction. Apart from the fact that there are not many efficient techniques for evaluating energy consumption for applications on mobile devices, the methods used are static in nature. Static techniques assume that during the running of an application, no other process can run concurrently, and the concerned application has the entire CPU at its disposal. In this paper, we propose a novel idea of measuring the energy consumption of an application running on a mobile device considering the fact that not always the entire CPU is available. This is because the application may sometimes run in the foreground when the mobile is idle and therefore, use the maximum CPU available, at other times, there maybe other tasks being run (apart from the routine background tasks) by the user for which this application is forced to run in the background. The major highlight of this paper is in considering the concept of variable CPU availability in energy analysis. We have also suggested to model the energy consumption problem of a mobile phone as a finite state automaton, where our aim is to find if a state can be reached where the entire battery of the mobile phone is exhausted.