EnTrack: a system facility for analyzing energy consumption of Android system services

Energy accounting is an essential requirement for optimizing energy consumption on mobile devices. State-of-the-art approaches consider application processes and threads as the sole components of energy consumption. In this framework, the energy consumption of system services is unclear and has not been comprehensively studied. In this paper, we suggest that the energy consumption of system services should be investigated to understand the behavior of applications. We propose a fine-grained energy tracing scheme, EnTrack, to enhance the accuracy of energy tracing by identifying and incorporating the energy portions consumed by system services. We implemented EnTrack on the Android platform and validated its functionality and usefulness. In addition, practical usage cases of EnTrack, which uses it as an energy behavior analysis tool, were introduced. The case studies demonstrated that EnTrack enables an understanding of fine-grained energy consumption, especially in system services, which have previously been concealed.