Analyzing and Improving Performance and Energy Efficiency of Android

Mobile devices and embedded devices need more processing power but energy consumption should be less to save battery power. Open Handset Alliance (OHA) hosting members like Google, Motorola, HTC etc. released an open source platform Android for mobile devices. Android is also used in netbook and other embedded platforms. Android runs on top of linux kernel with a custom JVM set on top of it. Android uses a new power management framework to save power in mobile devices. Android developers are allowed to build only JAVA applications. Google tries to make Android as energy efficient as possible to save battery power in mobile devices. In this work, we present benefits of using Android in low power embedded devices. We compared Android JAVA performance with popular Sun embedded JVM running on top of Angstrom linux. Our work shows that Android provides better VM designs but consumes more energy due to lack of dynamic compiler in Dalvik JVM. The implication is that, Android has become power efficient but not energy efficient. Android can be made more energy efficient by improving performance of JAVA applications. We developed a JAVA DSP framework which allows Android JAVA applications to run on both ARM and DSP in parallel and thus improves performance. We also showed, Android can be made more energy efficient by running Android applications on both ARM and DSP using our developed framework.