Dependability Assessment of the Android OS through Fault Injection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic approach to assess Android OS dependability by developing a fault model, creating an injection tool, and conducting extensive experiments to identify reliability issues.

Contribution

It provides a realistic fault model, an extensible fault injection tool (AndroFIT), and empirical data on Android OS reliability from multiple commercial devices.

Findings

Identified key reliability issues in Android OS

Developed a systematic fault modeling guideline

Conducted large-scale fault injection experiments

Abstract

The reliability of mobile devices is a challenge for vendors, since the mobile software stack has significantly grown in complexity. In this paper, we study how to assess the impact of faults on the quality of user experience in the Android mobile OS through fault injection. We first address the problem of identifying a realistic fault model for the Android OS, by providing to developers a set of lightweight and systematic guidelines for fault modeling. Then, we present an extensible fault injection tool (AndroFIT) to apply such fault model on actual, commercial Android devices. Finally, we present a large fault injection experimentation on three Android products from major vendors, and point out several reliability issues and opportunities for improving the Android OS.