Fine-Grained Energy Modeling for the Source Code of a Mobile Application

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel fine-grained energy modeling approach for mobile application source code, using energy operations directly from code to improve energy efficiency analysis and optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to construct detailed energy models based on energy operations identified from source code, overcoming limitations of previous coarse-grained techniques.

Findings

Effective energy modeling for game-engine applications

Provides detailed insights for code optimization

Applicable to a wider range of applications

Abstract

Energy efficiency has a significant influence on user experience of battery-driven devices such as smartphones and tablets. The goal of an energy model for source code is to lay a foundation for the application of energy-saving techniques during software development. The challenge is to relate hardware energy consumption to high-level application code, considering the complex run-time context and software stack. Traditional techniques build the energy model by mapping a hardware energy model onto software constructs; this approach faces obstacles when the software stack consists of a number of abstract layers. Another approach that has been followed is to utilize hardware or operating system features to estimate software energy information at a coarse level of granularity such as blocks, methods or even applications. In this paper, we explain how to construct a fine-grained energy model for the source code, which is based on "energy operations" identified directly from the source code and able to provide more valuable information for code optimization. We apply the approach to a class of applications based on a game-engine, and explain the wider applicability of the method.