PETrA: a Software-based Tool for Estimating the Energy Profile of Android Applications

Energy efficiency is a vital characteristic of any mobile application, and indeed it is becoming an important factor for user satisfaction. For this reason, in the recent years several approaches and tools for measuring the energy consumption of mobile devices have been proposed. Hardware-based solutions are highly precise, but at the same time they require costly hardware toolkits. Model-based techniques require a possibly difficult calibration of the parameters needed to correctly create a model on a specific hardware device. Finally, software-based solutions are easier to use, but they are possibly less precise than hardware-based solution. In this demo, we present PETrA, a novel software based tool for measuring the energy consumption of Android apps. We also provide evidence that our tool is able to perform similarly to hardware-based solutions.

能源效率是各类移动应用的核心性能指标之一，如今更已成为影响用户满意度的关键因素。为此，近年来学界已提出多种用于测量移动设备能耗的方法与工具。基于硬件的解决方案精度极高，但需使用成本不菲的硬件工具包；基于模型的技术则需对参数进行复杂校准，方能在特定硬件设备上构建准确的能耗模型；而基于软件的解决方案虽更易于部署与使用，但其测量精度通常略低于硬件方案。在本演示中，我们将介绍PETrA——一款专为安卓（Android）应用能耗测量设计的新型软件工具。同时我们将通过实验验证，本工具的测量表现可媲美硬件级解决方案。