ARENA: A tool for measuring and analysing the energy efficiency of Android apps

2025-10-02

AI Summary

Existing Android energy measurement approaches lack open-source, reliable hardware-level tools, resulting in time-consuming experiments and poor reproducibility. This paper introduces the first automated evaluation framework that deeply integrates physical power measurement hardware—based on high-precision current/voltage sampling—with mainstream IDEs (Android Studio/IntelliJ). Leveraging a custom-built IDE plugin, the framework unifies test triggering, real-time data acquisition, automatic data cleaning and aggregation, multi-run statistical analysis, and visualization reporting. Its key innovation lies in seamlessly embedding hardware-level power measurement directly into the development environment, enabling reproducible, high-accuracy energy-efficiency comparisons under realistic usage scenarios (e.g., cross-version or cross-app evaluations). The solution substantially lowers the barrier to rigorous energy measurement while improving reliability and efficiency. As an open-source infrastructure, it advances both mobile energy-efficiency research and industrial engineering optimization.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

To build energy-efficient apps, there is a need to estimate and analyze their energy consumption in typical usage scenarios. The energy consumption of Android apps could be estimated via software-based and hardware-based approaches. Software-based approaches, while easier to implement, are not as accurate as hardware-based approaches. The process of measuring the energy consumption of an Android app via a hardware-based approach typically involves 1) setting up a measurement environment, 2) executing the app under test on a mobile device, 3) recording current/voltage data via a hardware device to measure energy consumption, and 4) cleaning and aggregating data for analyses, reports, and visualizations. Specialized scripts are written for selected hardware and software components to ensure reliable energy measurements. The energy measurement process is repeated many times and aggregated to remove noise. These steps make the hardware-based energy measurement process time-consuming and not easy to adapt or reproduce. There is a lack of open-source tools available for developers and researchers to take reliable energy measurements via hardware devices. In this paper, we present and demonstrate ARENA, a support tool that enables developers and researchers to connect to a physical measurement device without leaving the comfort of their IDE. Developers could use ARENA during development to compare energy consumption between different apps or versions of the same app. ARENA calculates energy consumption on an Android smartphone by executing a test scenario on the app under development. Further, ARENA helps aggregate, statistically analyze, report, and visualize the data, allowing developers and researchers to dig into the data directly or visually. We implemented ARENA as an IntelliJ and Android Studio plugin.

Problem

• Measuring Android app energy consumption is time-consuming
• Hardware-based energy measurement lacks open-source tools
• Existing approaches are difficult to adapt and reproduce

Innovation

• ARENA integrates hardware energy measurement into IDE
• Automates test execution and data aggregation processes
• Provides statistical analysis and visualization for energy data