NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards a User Centric Battery Management System for Smartphones

Synopsis

We first seek to develop a fundamental understanding of the factors that affect energy-consumption in apps, with an emphasis on how they cause energy-consumption to differ across usage patterns. Based on this understanding, we propose to design and implement a user-centric battery management system, TIDE (TIDE stands for Tool for IDentifying Energy hungry applications on smartphones). TIDE has two primary goals. First, it seeks to determine and report to the user, which apps on her phone dominate the consumption of the phone's battery. The second objective of TIDE is to incorporate targeted solutions that change the mode of operation for some of the user' s services, so as to trade-off performance for energy efficiency. In other words, it seeks to offer the user the choice of continuing to use a specific set of services at reduced quality or performance, towards conserving her battery.

Towards fulfilling the above goals, we propose the following tasks:

• Task 1: Understanding the various factors that affect the energy consumption of apps on smartphones
• Task 2: Identifying user-specific energy hungry applications
• Task 3: Designing solutions that trade-off performance for energy-efficiency

We expect that the proposed work will have an immediate impact in empowering users with an ability to control their battery usage. It will create a public awareness of types of smartphone activities that will result in high battery drainage. The proposed work will also impact education at UCR and UCD in significant ways. New courses on system design and implementation will be introduced. Further, the PIs will undertake outreach efforts where they will visit nearby K-12 schools to inspire students about computer science research. The PIs are committed to fostering diversity and advising women.

Personnel

• PIs:
• Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy
• Prasant Mohapatra
• Graduate students:
• Tuan Dao
• Indrajeet Singh
• Azeem Aqil
• Ahmed Atya
• Li Zhang

Collabolators

• Harsha V. Madhyastha
• Guohong Cao
• Iulian Neamtiu

Broader Impacts of the proposed work:

Research:

• The work demonstrates that user-centric behaviors influence app energy consumption on smartphones. The tool TIDE presents users with the most energy hungry applications on their phone. The code will be made available upon request.
• The work resulted in characterizing the energy costs with various types of applications (e.g., video streaming and instant messaging). The understanding developed can influence future research efforts in making such applications energy thrifty.
• The research also resulted in the development of a tool ZapDroid which automatically quarantines unused apps on a user's phone (these apps run in the background otherwise and consume energy). This can significantly help extend smartphone battery lives.

Education and Outreach:

• Five Ph.D students who were either fully or partially supported from this grant have graduated with Ph.Ds. They have found employment at Amazon, SalesForce and Samsung among others.
• Energy consumption in wireless networks was introduced as a topic in CS 169 at UCR. In particular, the final project in some of the offerings required students to examine energy consumption on WiFi networks and how they can use the minimum energy to communicate with the AP.
• Components of the proposed research were integrated into the Senior Design Sequence ECS 193 A an ECS 193 B at UC Davis.
• PI Krishnamurthy had several conversations with Martin Luther King high school teachers about having students come to UCR for summers. One such student had committed to coming but finally did not because of some personal issues. We will continue to pursue such efforts.

Publication

• Tuan Dao, Indrajeet Singh, Harsha Madhyastha, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, Guohong Cao and Prasant Mohapatra "TIDE: A User-Centric Tool for Identifying Energy Hungry Applications on Smarthphones", in 2017 IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• Indrajeet Singh, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Harsha V. Madhyastha and Iulian Neamtiu, "ZapDroid: Managing Infrequently Used Applications on Smartphones", in 2017 IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
• Azeem Aqil, Ahmed Atya, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, George Papageorgiou "Streaming Lower Quality Energy over LTE: How Much Energy Can you save?", in 2015 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
• Tuan Dao, Indrajeet Singh, Harsha Madhyastha, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, Guohong Cao and Prasant Mohapatra,"TIDE: A User-Centric Tool for Identifying Energy Hungry Applications on Smartphones", in ICDCS'2015
• Li Zhang, Chao Xu, Parth H. Pathak and Prasant Mohapatra, "Characterizing Instant Messaging Apps on Smartphones", accepted in PAM'2015
• Li Zhang, Parth H. Pathak, Muchen Wu, Yixin Zhao and Prasant Mohapatra, "AccelWord: Energy Efficient Hotword Detection through Accelerometer", accepted in Mobisys'2015
• Indrajeet Singh, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Harsha V. Madhyastha and Iulian Neamtiu, "ZapDroid: Managing Infrequently Used Applications on Smartphones", in UbiComp'2015