research-article

Enhancing mobile apps to use sensor hubs without programmer effort

Authors:

Aruna Balasubramanian,

Anthony LaMarca,

David WetherallAuthors Info & Claims

UbiComp '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

Pages 227 - 238

https://doi.org/10.1145/2750858.2804260

Published: 07 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Always-on continuous sensing apps drain the battery quickly because they prevent the main processor from sleeping. Instead, sensor hub hardware, available in many smartphones today, can run continuous sensing at lower power while keeping the main processor idle. However, developers have to divide functionality between the main processor and the sensor hub. We implement MobileHub, a system that automatically rewrites applications to leverage the sensor hub without additional programming effort. MobileHub uses a combination of dynamic taint tracking and machine learning to learn when it is safe to leverage the sensor hub without affecting application semantics. We implement MobileHub in Android and prototype a sensor hub on a 8-bit AVR micro-controller. We experiment with 20 applications from Google Play. Our evaluation shows that MobileHub significantly reduces power consumption for continuous sensing apps.

References

[1]

Activity recognitionclient: http://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android.

[2]

Apple M7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M7.

[3]

BeWell Mobile Application. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bewellapp&hl=en.

[4]

Intel Context Sensing SDK. https://software.intel.com/en-us/context-sensing-sdk.

[5]

ios core motion framework reference: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios.

[6]

Physicaloid: Physical computing with a smartphone. http://www.physicaloid.com/?lang=en.

[7]

RF, Wi-Fi and Other Wireless Microcontroller-Based Solutions. http://www.atmel.com/products/wireless/.

[8]

XMega-A3BU XPlained. http://www.atmel.com/tools/XMEGA-A3BUXPLAINED.aspx.

[9]

Atmel: USB Device CDC Application. http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc8447.pdf, 2011.

[10]

TivaWare Sensor Library User Guide. http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/spmu371/spmu371.pdf, 2015.

[11]

Agarwal, Y., Hodges, S., Chandra, R., Scott, J., Bahl, P., and Gupta, R. Somniloquy: augmenting network interfaces to reduce pc energy usage. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation, NSDI'09, USENIX Association (Berkeley, CA, USA, 2009), 365--380.

Digital Library

[12]

Arzt, S., Rasthofer, S., Fritz, C., Bodden, E., Bartel, A., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y., Octeau, D., and McDaniel, P. Flowdroid: Precise context, flow, field, object-sensitive and lifecycle-aware taint analysis for android apps. In Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI '14, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2014), 259--269.

Digital Library

[13]

Austin, T. H., and Flanagan, C. Permissive dynamic information flow analysis. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security, PLAS '10, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2010), 3:1--3:12.

Digital Library

[14]

Bao, T., Zheng, Y., Lin, Z., Zhang, X., and Xu, D. Strict control dependence and its effect on dynamic information flow analyses. In Proceedings of the 19th international symposium on Software testing and analysis, ACM (2010), 13--24.

Digital Library

[15]

Bo, C., Li, X.-Y., Jung, T., Mao, X., Tao, Y., and Yao, L. Smartloc: Push the limit of the inertial sensor based metropolitan localization using smartphone. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing & Networking, MobiCom '13, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2013), 195--198.

Digital Library

[16]

Cao, Y., Fratantonio, Y., Bianchi, A., Egele, M., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G., and Chen, Y. Automatically detecting implicit control flow transitions through the android framework. In In Proceeding of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS15 (2015).

[17]

Clause, J., Li, W., and Orso, A. Dytan: a generic dynamic taint analysis framework. In Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Software testing and analysis, ACM (2007), 196--206.

Digital Library

[18]

DATASHEET, A. 8-bit avr® microcontroller with 4/8/16/32k bytes in-system programmable flash, 2010.

[19]

Denning, D. E., and Denning, P. J. Certification of programs for secure information flow. Commun. ACM 20, 7 (July 1977), 504--513.

Digital Library

[20]

Enck, W., Gilbert, P., Chun, B.-G., Cox, L. P., Jung, J., McDaniel, P., and Sheth, A. N. Taintdroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones. In OSDI (2010).

Digital Library

[21]

Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., and Witten, I. H. The WEKA data mining software: an update. ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter 11, 1 (2009), 10--18.

Digital Library

[22]

Hao, S., Liu, B., Nath, S., Halfond, W. G., and Govindan, R. Puma: Programmable ui-automation for large-scale dynamic analysis of mobile apps. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys '14, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2014), 204--217.

Digital Library

[23]

Hill, J., Szewczyk, R., Woo, A., Hollar, S., Culler, D., and Pister, K. System architecture directions for networked sensors. In ACM SIGOPS operating systems review, vol. 34, ACM (2000), 93--104.

Digital Library

[24]

Jeff, B. Advances in big. little technology for power and energy savings. ARM White Paper (2012).

[25]

Kang, M. G., McCamant, S., Poosankam, P., and Song, D. Dta++: Dynamic taint analysis with targeted control-flow propagation. In NDSS (2011).

[26]

Kansal, A., Saponas, T. S., Brush, A. J. B., McKinley, K. S., Mytkowicz, T., and Ziola, R. The latency, accuracy, and battery (lab) abstraction: programmer productivity and energy efficiency for continuous mobile context sensing. In OOPSLA, ACM (2013), 661--676.

Digital Library

[27]

Lin, F. X., Wang, Z., and Zhong, L. K2: A mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains. In ASPLOS (2014).

Digital Library

[28]

Lin, X. F., Wang, Z., LiKamWa, R., and Zhong, L. Reflex: Using low-power processors in smartphones without knowing them. In ASPLOS (2012).

Digital Library

[29]

Lisa, E. Intel Unveils New Merrifield Smartphone Chip With Integrated Sensor Hub. http://blog.laptopmag.com/intel-merrifield-smartphone-chip.

[30]

Liu, J., Priyantha, B., Hart, T., Ramos, H. S., Loureiro, A. A. F., and Wang, Q. Energy efficient gps sensing with cloud offloading. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems, SenSys '12, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2012), 85--98.

Digital Library

[31]

Morales, M. An Introduction to the Tiva™ C Series Platform of Microcontrollers. Tech. rep., Texas Instruments, April 2013.

[32]

Nath, S. Ace: Exploiting correlation for energy-efficient and continuous context sensing. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys '12, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2012), 29--42.

Digital Library

[33]

Priyantha, B., Lymberopoulos, D., and Liu, J. Littlerock: Enabling energy-efficient continuous sensing on mobile phones. In IEEE Pervasive Computing (2011).

Digital Library

[34]

Ra, M.-R., Priyantha, B., Kansal, A., and Liu, J. Improving energy efficiency of personal sensing applications with heterogeneous multi-processors. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp '12, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2012), 1--10.

Digital Library

[35]

Ravindranath, L., Nath, S., Padhye, J., and Balakrishnan, H. Automatic and scalable fault detection for mobile applications. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys '14, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2014), 190--203.

Digital Library

[36]

Rosen, S., Qian, Z., and Mao, Z. M. Appprofiler: A flexible method of exposing privacy-related behavior in android applications to end users. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, CODASPY '13, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2013), 221--232.

Digital Library

[37]

Shih, E., Bahl, P., and Sinclair, M. J. Wake on wireless: an event driven energy saving strategy for battery operated devices. In Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, MobiCom '02, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2002), 160--171.

Digital Library

[38]

Sorber, J., Banerjee, N., Corner, M. D., and Rollins, S. Turducken: hierarchical power management for mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, MobiSys '05, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 261--274.

Digital Library

[39]

Stankovic, J. A., Wood, A. D., and He, T. Realistic applications for wireless sensor networks. In Theoretical Aspects of Distributed Computing in Sensor Networks. Springer, 2011, 835--863.

[40]

Stone, M. Cross-validatory choice and assessment of statistical predictions. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) (1974), 111--147.

[41]

Vallée-Rai, R., Co, P., Gagnon, E., Hendren, L., Lam, P., and Sundaresan, V. Soot: A java bytecode optimization framework. In CASCON First Decade High Impact Papers, IBM Corp. (2010), 214--224.

Digital Library

[42]

Vallee-Rai, R., and Hendren, L. J. Jimple: Simplifying java bytecode for analyses and transformations.

[43]

Vogt, P., Nentwich, F., Jovanovic, N., Kirda, E., Kruegel, C., and Vigna, G. Cross-site scripting prevention with dynamic data tainting and static analysis. In In Proceeding of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS07 (2007).

[44]

Zhang, L., Gordon, M. S., Dick, R. P., Mao, Z. M., Dinda, P., and Yang, L. Adel: An automatic detector of energy leaks for smartphone applications. In Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis, CODES+ISSS '12, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2012), 363--372.

Digital Library

[45]

Zhuang, Z., Kim, K.-H., and Singh, J. P. Improving energy efficiency of location sensing on smartphones. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys '10, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2010), 315--330.

Digital Library

Cited By

Xu JBhattacharya ABalasubramanian APorter D(2021)Sensor Virtualization for Efficient Sharing of Mobile and Wearable SensorsProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3485730.3493451(460-466)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485730.3493451
Hough KBell J(2021)A Practical Approach for Dynamic Taint Tracking with Control-flow RelationshipsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348546431:2(1-43)Online publication date: 24-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485464
Guo LZhai SQiao YLin FDan TDahlia M(2019)TranskernelProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358865(675-691)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358865
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Enhancing mobile apps to use sensor hubs without programmer effort
1. Computer systems organization

Recommendations

Serving Mobile Apps: A Slice at a Time
EuroSys '19: Proceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019

End users wanting to do more and more with mobile apps has led to explosive growth in the number of available apps. This has widened the gap between developers making apps available and end users being able to install all the apps they want on their ...
Automated re-factoring of Android apps to enhance energy-efficiency
MOBILESoft '16: Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are energy constrained by nature. Therefore, apps targeted for such platforms must be energy-efficient. However, due to the use of energy oblivious design practices often this is not the case. In this ...
Spam Mobile Apps: Characteristics, Detection, and in the Wild Analysis

The increased popularity of smartphones has attracted a large number of developers to offer various applications for the different smartphone platforms via the respective app markets. One consequence of this popularity is that the app markets are also ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

UbiComp '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

September 2015

1302 pages

ISBN:9781450335744

DOI:10.1145/2750858

General Chairs:
Kenji Mase
Nagoya University, JP
,
Marc Langheinrich
Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), CH
,
Daniel Gatica-Perez
IDIAP-EPFL, CH
,
Program Chairs:
Hans Gellersen
Lancaster University, UK
,
Tanzeem Choudhury
Cornell University
,
Koji Yatani
Univerisity of Tokyo, JP

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Yahoo! Japan: Yahoo! Japan
SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing
FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.: FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
Google Inc.
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
Rakuten Institute of Technology: Rakuten Institute of Technology
Microsoft: Microsoft
Bell Labs: Bell Laboratories
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
KDDI
Panasonic: Panasonic Corporation
NTT DoCoMo
Telefónica: Telefónica
ISTC-PC: Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 September 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing
National Science Foundation

Conference

UbiComp '15

Sponsor:

Yahoo! Japan
SIGMOBILE
FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
ACM
Rakuten Institute of Technology
Microsoft
Bell Labs
SIGCHI
Panasonic
Telefónica
ISTC-PC

UbiComp '15: The 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

September 7 - 11, 2015

Osaka, Japan

Acceptance Rates

UbiComp '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 101 of 394 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

25
Total Citations
View Citations
505
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Xu JBhattacharya ABalasubramanian APorter D(2021)Sensor Virtualization for Efficient Sharing of Mobile and Wearable SensorsProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3485730.3493451(460-466)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485730.3493451
Hough KBell J(2021)A Practical Approach for Dynamic Taint Tracking with Control-flow RelationshipsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348546431:2(1-43)Online publication date: 24-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485464
Guo LZhai SQiao YLin FDan TDahlia M(2019)TranskernelProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358865(675-691)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358865
Tariq HTahir ATouati FAl-Hitmi MCrescini DBen Manouer A(2019)Geographical Area Network—Structural Health Monitoring Utility Computing ModelISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi80301548:3(154)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8030154
Kim DPark SKo JKo SLee SGuimbretière FBernstein MReinecke K(2019)X-DroidProceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3332165.3347890(95-108)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3332165.3347890
Park CKi TBen Ali APawar NDantu KKo SZiarek L(2019)GestoProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33009643:EICS(1-22)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3300964
Kolamunna HThilakarathna KPerino DMakaroff DSeneviratne A(2019)Seamless Resource Sharing in Wearable Networks by Application Function VirtualizationIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.286186118:6(1393-1406)Online publication date: 3-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TMC.2018.2861861
Ki TPark CDantu KKo SZiarek LAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)MimicProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00040(246-256)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00040
Graubner PThelen CKörber MSterz ASalvaneschi GMezini MSeeger BFreisleben B(2018)Multimodal Complex Event Processing on Mobile DevicesProceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems10.1145/3210284.3210289(112-123)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3210284.3210289
Razeen ALebeck ALiu DMeijer APistol VCox L(2018)SandTrapProceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3210240.3210321(230-242)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3210240.3210321
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten