Into the wild: studying real user activity patterns to guide power optimizations for mobile architectures

Abstract

As the market for mobile architectures continues its rapid growth, it has become increasingly important to understand and optimize the power consumption of these battery-driven devices. While energy consumption has been heavily explored, there is one critical factor that is often overlooked -- the end user. Ultimately, the energy consumption of a mobile architecture is defined by user activity. In this paper, we study mobile architectures in their natural environment -- in the hands of the end user. Specifically, we develop a logger application for Android G1 mobile phones and release the logger into the wild to collect traces of real user activity. We then show how the traces can be used to characterize power consumption, and guide the development of power optimizations.