TY - GEN
T1 - How do mobile phones fail? A failure data analysis of symbian OS smart phones
AU - Cinque, Marcello
AU - Cotroneo, Domenico
AU - Kalbarczyk, Zbigniew T
AU - Iyer, Ravishankar K
PY - 2007/11/16
Y1 - 2007/11/16
N2 - While the new generation of hand-held devices, e.g., smart phones, support a rich set of applications, growing complexity of the hardware and runtime environment makes the devices susceptible to accidental errors and malicious attacks. Despite these concerns, very few studies have looked into the dependability of mobile phones. This paper presents measurement-based failure characterization of mobile phones. The analysis starts with a high level failure characterization of mobile phones based on data from publicly available web forums, where users post information on their experiences in using hand-held devices. This initial analysis is then used to guide the development of a failure data logger for collecting failure-related information on SymbianOS-based smart phones. Failure data is collected from 25 phones (in Italy and USA) over the period of 14 months. Key findings indicate that: (i) the majority of kernel exceptions are due to memory access violation errors (56%) and heap management problems (18%), and (ii) on average users experience a failure (freeze or self shutdown) every 11 days. While the study provide valuable insight into the failure sensitivity of smart-phones, more data and further analysis are needed before generalizing the results.
AB - While the new generation of hand-held devices, e.g., smart phones, support a rich set of applications, growing complexity of the hardware and runtime environment makes the devices susceptible to accidental errors and malicious attacks. Despite these concerns, very few studies have looked into the dependability of mobile phones. This paper presents measurement-based failure characterization of mobile phones. The analysis starts with a high level failure characterization of mobile phones based on data from publicly available web forums, where users post information on their experiences in using hand-held devices. This initial analysis is then used to guide the development of a failure data logger for collecting failure-related information on SymbianOS-based smart phones. Failure data is collected from 25 phones (in Italy and USA) over the period of 14 months. Key findings indicate that: (i) the majority of kernel exceptions are due to memory access violation errors (56%) and heap management problems (18%), and (ii) on average users experience a failure (freeze or self shutdown) every 11 days. While the study provide valuable insight into the failure sensitivity of smart-phones, more data and further analysis are needed before generalizing the results.
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U2 - 10.1109/DSN.2007.54
DO - 10.1109/DSN.2007.54
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:36049002858
SN - 0769528554
SN - 9780769528557
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
SP - 585
EP - 594
BT - Proceedings - 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2007
T2 - 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2007
Y2 - 25 June 2007 through 28 June 2007
ER -