On Measuring Smartphones’ Software Energy Requirements

The continuous technological evolution of smartphones regarding their performance, networking facilities, and memory capacity, as well as various sensors, leads to a significant increase of a device’s energy requirements. Hence, energy demand is one of the most limiting factors of battery-driven, mobile devices. Improving energy demand by software optimisation often relies on simulated energy demand data. This paper evaluates two approaches for actually measuring real energy data with the goal to build an efficient and cost-effective basis for future research. The main question underlying this paper is: Is the preciseness of energy data provided by a smartphone’s operating system reliably close to the preciseness of data obtained via classic (i.e., hardwarebased) measurement approaches. We defined a case study to evaluate this question. Our evaluation results show that software-based energy measures have an acceptable preciseness for comparative measures and are thus sufficient for research that warrants or requires total values.