Identifying battery-draining applications by monitoring behavior in screen-off state in Android

Abstract

Power consumption is one of the most important issues of smartphones. Android OS, a popular smartphone operating system, has a function with which an application can be invoked in screen-off state without user's operation. Some applications frequently work in screen-off state, and consume battery. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying applications that largely drain battery in Screen-off state in Android devices. We introduce the standard method of Android for estimating power consumption of each application, and show that it cannot always estimate consumption correctly. Then, we propose a method for identifying heavily battery-draining application by monitoring setting and invoking alarm, which is a common method for executing an application in screen-off state. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can identify battery-draining applications more correctly than the standard method of Android operating system.