ThermTap: An online power analyzer and thermal simulator for Android devices

Abstract

This paper introduces ThermTap, which enables system and software developers to monitor the power consumption and temperature of various hardware components in an Android device as a function of running applications and processes. ThermTap comprises of a power analyzer, called PowerTap, and an online thermal simulator, called Therminator 2. With accurate power macro-models, PowerTap collates activity profiles of major components of a portable device from the OS kernel device drivers in an event-driven manner to generate power traces. In turn, Therminator 2 reads these traces and, using a compact thermal model of the device, generates various temperature maps including those for the device components and device skin. Fast thermal simulation techniques enable Therminator 2 to be executed in realtime. With precise per-process and per-application temperature maps that ThermTap produces, it enables software and system developers to find thermal bugs in their software. A case study is presented on identifying a thermal bug in the software running on an Android device.