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ADEL: an automatic detector of energy leaks for smartphone applications

Published: 07 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Energy leaks occur when applications use energy to perform useless tasks, a surprisingly common occurrence. They are particularly important for mobile applications running on smartphones due to their energy constraints. Energy leaks are difficult to detect and isolate because their negative consequences are often far removed from their causes. Few tools are available for addressing this problem. We have therefore developed ADEL (Automatic Detector of Energy Leaks). ADEL consists of taint-tracking enhancements to the Android platform. It detects and isolates energy leaks resulting from unnecessary network communication by tracing the direct and indirect use of received data to determine whether they ever affect the user. We profiled 15 applications using ADEL. In six of them, energy leaks detected by ADEL and verified by us account for approximately 57% of the energy consumed in communication. We identified four common causes of energy leaks in these applications: misinterpretation of callback API semantics, poorly designed downloading schemes, repetitive downloads, and aggressive prefetching.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Combatting Energy Issues for Mobile ApplicationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/352785132:1(1-44)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
  • (2022)A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.307119348:8(2879-2904)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Energy inefficiency diagnosis for Android applications: a literature reviewFrontiers of Computer Science10.1007/s11704-021-0532-417:1Online publication date: 8-Aug-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
CODES+ISSS '12: Proceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
October 2012
596 pages
ISBN:9781450314268
DOI:10.1145/2380445
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 October 2012

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Author Tags

  1. energy bugs
  2. energy leaks
  3. mobile application

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  • Research-article

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ESWEEK'12
ESWEEK'12: Eighth Embedded System Week
October 7 - 12, 2012
Tampere, Finland

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CODES+ISSS '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 163 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 280 of 864 submissions, 32%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Combatting Energy Issues for Mobile ApplicationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/352785132:1(1-44)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
  • (2022)A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.307119348:8(2879-2904)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Energy inefficiency diagnosis for Android applications: a literature reviewFrontiers of Computer Science10.1007/s11704-021-0532-417:1Online publication date: 8-Aug-2022
  • (2021)A GUI Based Approach to Detect Energy Bugs in Android Applications2021 16th International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET)10.1109/ICET54505.2021.9689870(1-6)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2021
  • (2021)Detection of Energy Bugs in Android Applications: A Systematic Literature Review2021 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)10.1109/FIT53504.2021.00012(7-12)Online publication date: Dec-2021
  • (2021)Energy Management Systems and Smart Phones: A Systematic Literature Survey2021 International Conference on Communications, Computing, Cybersecurity, and Informatics (CCCI)10.1109/CCCI52664.2021.9583184(1-7)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Energy Diagnosis of Android ApplicationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/341798653:6(1-36)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2020
  • (2020)EnergyDx: Diagnosing Energy Anomaly in Mobile Apps by Identifying the Manifestation Point2020 IEEE 40th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS47774.2020.00046(256-266)Online publication date: Nov-2020
  • (2020)Smartphone processor architecture, operations, and functions: current state-of-the-art and future outlook: energy performance trade-offThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-020-03312-z77:2(1377-1454)Online publication date: 16-May-2020
  • (2019)Power Consumption Analysis, Measurement, Management, and Issues: A State-of-the-Art Review of Smartphone Battery and Energy UsageIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29586847(182113-182172)Online publication date: 2019
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