Improing Screen Power Usage Model on Android Smartphones

With user experience becoming richer and richer on Android smartphones, limited battery capacity has become a major concern for users. It is a good practice for Android to tell users where the battery power has gone. Android achieves this by a power profile provided by OEMs that specifies the power usage rate for each system component staying at each specific state. According to a recent study, screen is one of the most dominant power-hungry system components on Android smartphones. However, the accuracy of Android´s screen power usage model is to be improved, taking not only the brightness, but also the displayed content into account. We modified Android source code to improve its screen power usage model and verified this improvement with experiments. The results show that our new screen power usage model is more accurate to a significant extent and introduces little overhead.