Early analysis of resource consumption patterns in mobile applications

Abstract Mobile device capabilities have increased tremendously in recent years, and the complexity of the applications executed in these devices has evolved accordingly. However, despite the efforts made by mobile manufactures, resource consumption, particularly battery and data traffic, are still limiting factors for mobile applications. The most important aspects determining the consumption of a mobile application is its software architecture and its behaviour. Hence, by comparing the resource consumption of different software architectures before an application is built, mobile developers can make decisions that are better informed. This work presents the consumption analysis of two applications, each of them built with two different architectures in order to identify under which situation each architecture is more efficient. In addition, by generalizing the analysis of the two applications, a conceptual framework is created with which to analyse the consumption pattern of applications in their early development phases. This conceptual framework will allow mobile developers to estimate the resource consumption of their applications under different conditions of software architecture and usage scenarios, providing them with information relevant for decision making.