The popularity of mobile games has increased drastically during the recent years andmany people use them as their main source of entertainment. Mobile gamescommunicate with other devices over the network which consumes a lot of energy,especially when connected to cellular networks (e.g., 3G). This high energy expensecan feel unjustified to the player since always-on network connectivity is not requiredin order to play most games.Furthermore, the number of malware-infected applications in offical applicationstores has increased significantly in the recent years. These malware-infectedapplications can gain unrestricted access and control of users phones which can be athreat to security. Information about the behaviour characteristics of games can beused to develop or improve systems for detecting malware applications.In this thesis, 20 popular Android games are analysed with a focus on the datacommunication, CPU utilization and system call behaviour. The main subject of thedata communication study is the 3G communication energy consumed by games. Thesystem call study aims at quantifying the number and type of calls used by games.This may be useful in a further study of harmful behaviour by apps.The profiling results presented in this report show that the communication energyvaries drastically among games. Games with a very similar gameplay can consumevery different amounts of energy which indicates that there is room for improvementsin many of the games. Ad-free games consume significantly less energy than gamesthat use in-app advertisements. The results show that improving the advertisementfetching policy could reduce the energy consumption of these games. The majority ofthe games can be played without network connectivity and therefore thecommunication energy consumed could be completely avoided. The thesis alsoshows that games use a wide variety of system calls and that many of the system callsare common among the games.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-115247 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Almquist, Mathias, Almquist, Viktor |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Programvara och system, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska högskolan, Linköpings universitet, Programvara och system, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska högskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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