EMaaS: Energy Measurements as a Service for Mobile Applications

TL;DR

EMaaS offers a reliable, accessible system for measuring mobile app energy consumption by intelligently combining energy models with hardware measurements, simplifying the process for developers and researchers.

Contribution

It introduces EMaaS, a novel system that dynamically chooses between energy models and hardware measurements to provide accurate energy data for mobile apps.

Findings

System effectively combines models and measurements for accuracy.

Reduces complexity of energy measurement setup.

Accessible as a community SaaS platform.

Abstract

Measuring energy consumption is a challenging task faced by developers when building mobile apps. This paper presents EMaaS: a system that provides reliable energy measurements for mobile applications, without requiring a complex setup. It combines estimations from an energy model with --- typically more reliable, but also expensive --- hardware-based measurements. On a per scenario basis, it decides whether the energy model is able to provide a reliable estimation of energy consumption. Otherwise, hardware-based measurements are provided. In addition, the system is accessible to the community of mobile software practitioners/researchers in the form of a Software as a Service. With this service, we aim at solving current problems in the field of energy efficiency in mobile software engineering: the complexity of hardware-based power monitor tools, the reliability of energy models, and the continuous need of data to build energy models.