CODEWITHSUNDEEP
android
Jonathan
Jonathan

Reputation: 2738

Android Power modeling like power tutor

I've been trying to follow what people who made power tutor did. From my understanding the approach the used is hardware specific not a software one. They modeled power consumption based on CPU utilization, wifi, GPS, audio and 3G. According to this paper. Is someone familiar with this approach? I wanted to know if I can model ths for any android device or is it a hardware dependent approach? And the power modeling formula that they used in the paper. What software parameters are they trying to extract for CPU utilization, wifi, GPS, audio and 3G to make the formula or the approach work? It's not very clear reading the paper. Any help in this aspect would be highly appritiated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1507

Answers (1)

Nicholas Kariniemi
Nicholas Kariniemi

Reputation: 36

The PowerTutor approach is largely hardware independent but needs to be specifically tailored for each new device. It relies on the availability of hardware system parameters largely through the /proc and /sys directories. For example, CPU utilization is read through /proc/stat and /proc/cpuinfo, GPS data from /data/misc/gps.status, LCD data from /sys/devices/virtual/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness, etc. These system parameters are plugged into the model equation to get an estimate of power consumption. The actual equation is found on page four of their paper and system parameter locations can be seen in the source code (specifically under tree/master/src/edu/umich/PowerTutor/components).

Assuming the same system parameters are available, to make PowerTutor work for a new device you would have to determine their coefficients for the specific device and update the application with the new device and its coefficients. The problem is that PowerTutor model uses coefficients determined by the associated PowerBooter tool, which is not publicly available. There's some description of how PowerBooter obtains the coefficients but you would have to re-implement the tests themselves.

Upvotes: 2

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