Reducing Power Consumption using Improved Wakelock on Android Platform

초록

The power consumption is one of the most important issues on a mobile device because they usually use battery as a power source. The Android platform, a popular software platform for a hand-held device, also supports various powersaving schemes to reduce power consumption. This power-saving feature sometimes causes unwanted computational disruption. To avoid such disruption, the Android platform provides Wakelock to disable the power-saving mode temporarily. However, since Wakelock can be easily accessed through the user’s API, improper use of Wakelock causes a huge extra power consumption. This paper proposes an improved Wakelock scheme that predicts the misuse of Wakelock. This improved Wakelock, called PRWakelock (Predict & self-Release Wakelock), does not only detect misuses of Wakelock, but also forcibly releases Wakelock for the system to go into a sleep mode. Several Android apps were implemented and an offline prediction software was also implemented on a linux platform for the the simulating PRWakelock. The hit ratio of the proposed system obtained through an offline prediction software was close to 86.44%.