WLCleaner: Reducing energy waste caused by wakelock bugs at runtime

Xigui Wang, Xianfeng Li, Wen Wen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Energy consumption is a first-order concern for battery-driven smartphones. To maximize battery life, Android employs an aggressive Power Management policy. The WakeLock mechanism is the key feature of Android Power Management, which allows application developers to explicitly prevent the critical resources including CPU, screen and keyboard from entering sleep state using WakeLock API. If abused, the application can drain the battery at a fast rate even when the application is not running. Unfortunately, the current programming environment of Android does not offer a reliable facility to identify Wakelock bugs in programs. To solve this problem, we have implemented a novel tool called WLCleaner that can detect WakeLock bugs and automatically handle it at runtime to minimize the power waste for users. We evaluate WLCleaner with real-world applications running on two Android smartphones, and the results show that when WakeLock bugs are removed by WLCleaner, the energy consumption at screen-off time is reduced by half.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2014 World Ubiquitous Science Congress
Subtitle of host publication2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, DASC 2014
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages429-434
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781479950799
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Nov 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event12th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, DASC 2014 - Dalian, Liaoning, China
Duration: 24 Aug 201427 Aug 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2014 World Ubiquitous Science Congress: 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, DASC 2014

Conference

Conference12th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, DASC 2014
Country/TerritoryChina
CityDalian, Liaoning
Period24/08/1427/08/14

Keywords

  • Android
  • Power Management
  • WakeLock

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