SEPIA: A framework for optimizing energy consumption in Android devices

Optimizing power consumption is of paramount importance in mobile subsystems. System, SoC, and semiconductor process designers give great attention to optimizing power consumption using a vast array of tools at their disposal. During the application development process, however, power optimization takes a back seat to performance. One of the reasons is that the application developers lack tools that enable them to examine the impact of their decisions on system power consumption. This paper presents a design-time power optimization solution called SEPIA (Samsung Electronics Power Information Analyzer) that lets system designers identify power saving opportunities and provides visibility to application developers about energy cost of their code at the source code line number granularity. It gives examples of power consumption optimization of Samsung and popular third-party mobile apps by comparing their power signatures and identifying power savings opportunities. It also presents the results of using SEPIA to optimize Samsung Galaxy S4 firmware.