The capabilities of mobile devices have increased dramatically and end-users are able to perform a wide range of useful tasks on their smartphones. However, the usability of these devices is strongly influenced by their energy consumption. Despite advances in hardware and battery design, a poorly coded application can drain a smartphone's battery with numerous energy-expensive operations. Developers lack the tools and techniques to identify when and where the energy consumption profiles of their applications can be improved. This research aims to help developers understand how energy is consumed within their applications, and to help them change their applications in ways that will lead to reduced energy consumption. Given the widespread use of mobile applications and the prevalence of energy consumption-related problems, this work will impact both end users and developers by improving applications? energy efficiency and enabling further research in this area. The results of this research will also have marked educational impact through the training of future software engineers in predicting, estimating, measuring, and managing the effects of their system designs and implementations on energy consumption.
This project includes three inter-related thrusts. The first thrust develops program analysis techniques for online measurement and visualization that provides energy consumption information to developers at the level of individual lines of an application?s source code. Using this capability, the second thrust identifies a set of energy-aware development best practices via an empirical study of the relationship between energy consumption and implementation structure at the application's architecture, design, and code levels. The third thrust uses the best practices to propose a set of energy-reducing refactorings to the developers and help them to identify the changes that will lead to the most energy efficient applications.
