Thoughts and conclusions on existing energy saving strategies for Android mobile phones

Since the first half of this year, Alibaba Cloud has moved its research work to mobile platforms. The main research target is the open-source Android platform, the research in the group covers security policies, code cloud migration, mobile app servitization, and energy optimization. The mentor asked me to follow the energy direction of the mobile platform and hoped that I would continue from this direction. He said that only those who stick to one point can become experts, which is the same as my original thought, by taking a solid approach, you can always find a good solution to the problems you can do.

Android mobile phone battery is not durable, which is widely known to users. The reason is that the battery provides limited energy while controlling the volume, in addition, it is pointed out that battery technology is difficult to break through in the past few years. This means that the battery power to support more and more users will not change much. Another cause of excessive power consumption is the improper behavior of the software. In my opinion, this is the most important reason and a key issue that can increase the power usage to support longer mobile phone activity in the near future, it is also the main scope of our research.

Software issues include operating system mechanisms and third-party application energy-Unaware development. Most of the documents currently read are about the optimization of the latter. I think the former has certain problems in energy optimization, and may think that the operating system has a high threshold, in the early stage, you are willing to start from the application perspective.

The existing work in this field (what I see now) is mainly divided into two types: one is to establish an energy model to find out the power consumption behavior of an application or the power consumption behavior of fine-grained methods or threads in the application, the second is to migrate the mobile app code to a remote server to save energy on the mobile phone end.

For the first type of work, the latest job is an article published on mobisys 12 by Abhinav Pathak, a PhD student at the Pudu University (now I should work at the Microsoft Research Institute, you can monitor the power consumption of each method and thread in the application. developers can check their own applications based on information feedback. Is the equivalent work done by the method that consumes a lot of power, if not, how can we optimize the energy consumption.

The Latest Result of the second type of work is the paper published by Zhang Ying of Peking University in oopsla 12. Through program analysis, it can automatically split the app code on the mobile phone end and migrate it to a remote server, and automatically package the code after splitting the mobile phone end into an APK file for normal execution. Everything is automatically implemented, which is also the most automated result in this kind of work.

The current work of our group does not belong to these two categories. Our goal is to optimize the Code through the method of program analysis. Although the method is similar to the latest work of the second category, however, our purpose is irrelevant to code migration.

Most of these work is based on Android and Windows Phone Systems. iOS is not involved, either because IOS is not open-source, or because IOS's energy consumption has been optimized, there is no space for improvement.

I plan to clarify the differences between iOS and Android power consumption modes in the next article ~ (I Didn't Mean To sell it out, because I am going to the meeting and have time to prepare O (∩ _ ∩) O ~)