A Case for Lease-Based, Utilitarian Resource Management on Mobile Devices

Mobile apps have become indispensable in our daily lives, but many apps are not designed to be energy-aware that they may consume the constrained resources on mobile devices in a wasteful manner. Blindly throttling heavy resource usage, while helps reducing energy consumption, prohibits apps from taking advantages of the resources to do useful work. We argue that addressing this issue requires mobile OS to continuously assess if a resource is still truly needed even after it is granted to an app. This paper proposes that lease, a mechanism commonly used in distributed systems, is a well-suited abstraction in resource-constrained mobile devices to mitigate app energy misbehavior. We design a lease-based, utilitarian resource management mechanism, LeaseOS, that analyzes the utility of a resource to an app at each lease term, and then makes lease decisions based on the utility. We implement LeaseOS on top of the latest Android OS and evaluate it with 20 real-world apps with energy bugs. LeaseOS reduces wasted power by 92% on average and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Android Doze and DefDroid. It also did not cause any usability disruption to the evaluated apps. LeaseOS itself incurs negligible energy overhead.