Published in

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE 2014

DOI: 10.1145/2568225.2568288

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

APE: An Annotation Language and Middleware for Energy-Efficient Mobile Application Development

Proceedings article published in 2014 by Nima Nikzad, Octav Chipara, William G. Griswold ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Energy-efficiency is a key concern in continuously-running mobile applications, such as those for health and context monitoring. Unfortunately, developers must implement complex and customized power-management policies for each application. This involves the use of complex primitives and writing error-prone multithreaded code to monitor hardware state. To address this problem, we present APE, an annotation language and middleware service that eases the development of energy-efficient Android applications. APE annotations are used to demarcate a power-hungry code segment whose execution is deferred until the device enters a state that minimizes the cost of that operation. The execution of power-hungry operations is coordinated across applications by the APE middleware. Several examples show the expressive power of our approach. A case study of using APE annotations in a real mobile sensing application shows that annotations can cleanly specify a power management policy and reduce the complexity of its implementation. An empirical evaluation of the middleware shows that APE introduces negligible overhead and equals hand-tuned code in energy savings, in this case achieving 63.4% energy savings compared to the case when there is no coordination.