Methods for measurement of energy consumption in mobile devices

Mobile devices have become an integral part of our life and provide dozens of useful services to their users. However, usability of mobile devices is hindered by battery lifetime. Energy conservation can extend battery lifetime, however, any energy management policy requires accurate prediction of energy consumption, which is impossible without reliable energy measurement and estimation methods and tools. We present an analysis of the energy measurement methodologies and describe the implementations of the internal (profiling) software (proprietary, custom) and external software-based (Java API, Sensor API, GSM AT) energy measurement methodologies. The methods are applied to measure energy consumption on a variety of mobile devices (laptop PC, PDA, smart phone). A case study of measuring energy consumption on a mobile computer using 3DMark06 benchmarking software is presented.