SBIR Phase I: Enabling Techologies for Energy-Centric Mobile App Design to Extend Mobile Device Battery Life

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project can be summarized as follows. (1) Societal impact: The PI's initial ground-breaking research on dissecting the energy drain of AngryBirds and exposing its inefficiency was covered by over 500 news media outlets worldwide. This interest reflects the growing importance of mobile computing devices in all strata of society. The importance of this work is heightened by smartphones being an important enabler of Internet access for disadvantaged people in both developed and developing countries, and hence being an important tool in overcoming the "digital divide". (2) Commercial impact: The technologies developed in this project for enabling energy-efficient app design will lead to longer battery life, which in turn leads to longer mobile eye time of users, which ultimately translates into millions of dollars of increased revenue to large businesses today as they transition towards mobile. The commercial outcome of the proposed SBIR project will lead to a marketable product and/or process. (3) Technological impact: This work will extend the performance profiling technology foundational to the software industry to the energy dimension, which is critical to the mobile software industry. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will tackle several key technical challenges in helping app developers to write energy-efficient apps, which holds the promise of extending the battery life of mobile devices and ultimately improving user mobile experience. The research objectives are (1) to develop energy analytics of mobile apps running on millions of users' phones and incentivize developers to adopt an energy-centric app design paradigm; (2) to develop technologies for app energy profiling with multiple resolutions which will make it easier for developers to adopt them in their app design process; (3) to develop energy-efficiency programming guidelines and templates for helping app developers to write energy-efficient apps in the first place. These objectives pose significant technical challenges. While similar challenges on the performance metric (e.g. running time) have been well studied for traditional software, in particular in high-performance computing, this project will take them to the energy dimension for the mobile software industry, which has not been attempted before. The company expects to develop the first set of solutions to these fundamental challenges in optimizing the energy drain of millions of mobile apps.