Carat

Abstract

We aim to detect and diagnose energy anomalies, abnormally heavy battery use. This paper describes a collaborative black-box method, and an implementation called Carat, for diagnosing anomalies on mobile devices. A client app sends intermittent, coarse-grained measurements to a server, which correlates higher expected energy use with client properties like the running apps, device model, and operating system. The analysis quantifies the error and confidence associated with a diagnosis, suggests actions the user could take to improve battery life, and projects the amount of improvement. During a deployment to a community of more than 500,000 devices, Carat diagnosed thousands of energy anomalies in the wild. Carat detected all synthetically injected anomalies, produced no known instances of false positives, projected the battery impact of anomalies with 95% accuracy, and, on average, increased a user's battery life by 11% after 10 days (compared with 1.9% for the control group).