Real-time sensing on android

Modern smartphones contain many hardware and software sensors, with numerous additional sensing capabilities scheduled to be added in future iterations of the hardware and Android framework layer. This comes at no surprise as sensing is a crucial aspect of most Android applications. Unfortunately, the Android framework provides few guarantees on the delivery of sensor data to applications that require it. Similarly, the Android specification does not provide much in terms of configuration, making its programming model difficult to utilize in more traditional real-time contexts. In this paper, we examine the Android's sensor architecture in detail and show why it is not suitable for use in a real-time context. We then introduce the re-design of the sensor architecture within RTDroid, illustrating how the RTDroid approach can provide realtime guarantees on sensing applications. We then introduce realtime extensions to the Android manifest that enable real-time sensing application writers to express static configuration requirements, using jPapaBench as our motivating example. Finally, we experimentally show that our re-designed sensing architecture can provide predictable performance for jPapaBench with memory-and computation-intensive background workloads.