A Measurement-Based Prioritization Scheme for Smartphone Applications

Applications labeled with priorities can reduce energy consumption on smartphones for network traffic, by conserving up to 56 % energy under typical usage patterns. In this paper, we present a measurement-based prioritization scheme for smartphone applications, which labels each application with a priority. More specifically, we first conduct a measurement of application usage on Android smartphones based on the implementation of SystemSens. Based on the measurement results, we observe that two key features of receiving rate (RX rate) and screen touch rate (ST rate) extracted from netlog and screen data can reflect the network interactivity and improve the accuracy of the prioritization scheme as well. Then, with the two selected features, we propose an online solution that prioritizes applications on smartphones to conserve energy consumption. Finally, we evaluate the proposed prioritization scheme with data from a user study, and the results demonstrate that our scheme can accurately prioritize applications on smartphones most of the time.