Software Aging Analysis of the Android Mobile OS

Mobile devices are significantly complex, feature-rich, and heavily customized, thus they are prone to software reliability and performance issues. This paper considers the problem of software aging in Android mobile OS, which causes the device to gradually degrade in responsiveness, and to eventually fail. We present a methodology to identify factors (such as workloads and device configurations) and resource utilization metrics that are correlated with software aging. Moreover, we performed an empirical analysis of recent Android devices, finding that software aging actually affects them. The analysis pointed out processes and components of the Android OS affected by software aging, and metrics useful as indicators of software aging to schedule software rejuvenation actions.