The Missing Numerator: Toward a Value Measure for Smartphone Apps

ABSTRACT

While great strides have been made in measuring energy consumption, these measures alone are not sufficient to enable effective energy management on battery-constrained mobile devices. What is urgently needed is a way to put energy consumption into context by measuring the value delivered by mobile apps. While difficult to compute, an accurate value measure would enable cross-app comparison, app improvement, energy inefficient app detection, and effective runtime energy allocation and prioritization. Our paper motivates the problem, describes requirements for a value measure, discusses and evaluates several possible inputs to such a measure, and presents results from a preliminary (unsuccessful) attempt to formulate one.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

    • Personal computers and PC applications

• Computer systems organization

  • Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks

• General and reference

  • Cross-computing tools and techniques

    • Performance

• Networks

  • Network performance evaluation