On death, taxes, and sleep disorder bugs in smartphones

According to Benjamin Franklin, life holds but two certainties, death and taxes. As we enter the mobile era, the primary mobile device, i.e. , the smartphone, faces the certainties of adopting agressive sleeping polices to conserve battery energy, requiring programmers to use explicit power control APIs to keep the SOC/CPU on, and a third certainty that unavoidably rises from these: sleep disorder bugs. In this paper, we articulate the fate and destiny of smartphone apps, sleep disorder bugs, as a critical technical challenge in the mobile era. We then present a taxonomy of sleep disorder bugs, and a categorization of time-critical sections which are the root cause of sleep disorders, in apps, framework services and the Android kernel. Finally, we present a unified system for detecting the spectrum of sleep disorder bugs.