eDoctor: automatically diagnosing abnormal battery drain issues on smartphones

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed an evolutionary change in the smartphone ecosystem. Smartphones have gone from closed platforms containing only pre-installed applications to open platforms hosting a variety of thirdparty applications. Unfortunately, this change has also led to a rapid increase in Abnormal Battery Drain (ABD) problems that can be caused by software defects or misconfiguration. Such issues can drain a fully-charged battery within a couple of hours, and can potentially affect a significant number of users. This paper presents eDoctor, a practical tool that helps regular users troubleshoot abnormal battery drain issues on smartphones. eDoctor leverages the concept of execution phases to capture an app’s time-varying behavior, which can then be used to identify an abnormal app. Based on the result of a diagnosis, eDoctor suggests the most appropriate repair solution to users. To evaluate eDoctor’s effectiveness, we conducted both in-lab experiments and a controlled user study with 31 participants and 17 realworld ABD issues together with 4 injected issues in 19 apps. The experimental results show that eDoctor can successfully diagnose 47 out of the 50 use cases while imposing no more than 1.5 % of power overhead. 1