Energy-Aware Performance Evaluation of Android Custom Kernels

Smartphones play a key role in several aspects of our daily life. Their range of application is constantly growing, making them versatile and necessary. However, mobile devices face an important problem: they hold an important autonomy requirement, which is constantly challenged by the short life of batteries. Researchers and practitioners have proposed different strategies to preserve battery life in mobile devices, both from hardware and software point of views. One of the software-based approaches is to apply optimizations at the level of the kernel of the operating system. This strategy is attractive, as it may improve the battery consumption of all applications running on top of the software kernel. The scope of this paper is to compare current Android kernel-based modifications evaluating their impact on battery consumption. To do it, we performed performance tests on each kernel, monitoring the battery consumption in background. Additionally, we run a general performance test to see the impact of the applied kernel modifications to the overall performance of the optimized device. Our results show that kernel level enhancements do improve the battery life and the device's performance. According to our tests, the analyzed custom kernels can reduce the battery consumption up to 33% for isolated tasks, improving the general performance of the device by up to 16%.