Can we identify smartphone app by power trace? [Extended abstract for special session]

Abstract

Power trace of a smartphone, as time series data, carries important information of the system behavior and is useful for many applications, such as energy management [1-3], software optimization [4-6] and anomaly detection [7, 8]. However, the power trace measured from the battery terminals include the power consumption by all the hardware components and thus describes the activity of the whole system. Yet modern smartphones are multiprocessing, i.e., multiple applications can be running simultaneously in the same system. Our goal is to answer the following question: “Can we identify smartphone app by power trace?” That is, whether the power trace of a smartphone can be different by running different applications.