Deep parameter optimisation on Android smartphones for energy minimisation: a tale of woe and a proof-of-concept

With power demands of mobile devices rising, it is becoming increasingly important to make mobile software applications more energy efficient. Unfortunately, mobile platforms are diverse and very complex which makes energy behaviours difficult to model. This complexity presents challenges to the effectiveness of off-line optimisation of mobile applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to automatically optimise an application for energy on a mobile device by evaluating energy consumption in-vivo. In contrast to previous work, we use only the device's own internal meter. Our approach involves many technical challenges but represents a realistic path toward learning hardware specific energy models for program code features.