BatteryLab, A Distributed Power Monitoring Platform For Mobile Devices

TL;DR

BatteryLab is a distributed platform that transforms scattered battery testing setups into a large-scale, heterogeneous measurement network for mobile devices, enabling more accessible and diverse battery research.

Contribution

The paper introduces BatteryLab, a novel distributed system that shares and coordinates existing battery testing hardware for large-scale, diverse mobile device battery measurements.

Findings

BatteryLab achieves accurate battery reporting comparable to traditional test-beds.

The system demonstrates scalable deployment across multiple sites.

Preliminary experiments show BatteryLab's potential for diverse battery research.

Abstract

Recent advances in cloud computing have simplified the way that both software development and testing are performed. Unfortunately, this is not true for battery testing for which state of the art test-beds simply consist of one phone attached to a power meter. These test-beds have limited resources, access, and are overall hard to maintain; for these reasons, they often sit idle with no experiment to run. In this paper, we propose to share existing battery testing setups and build BatteryLab, a distributed platform for battery measurements. Our vision is to transform independent battery testing setups into vantage points of a planetary-scale measurement platform offering heterogeneous devices and testing conditions. In the paper, we design and deploy a combination of hardware and software solutions to enable BatteryLab's vision. We then preliminarily evaluate BatteryLab's accuracy of battery reporting, along with some system benchmarking. We also demonstrate how BatteryLab can be used by researchers to investigate a simple research question.