Analysis of Differential Synchronisation's Energy Consumption on Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy consumption of the differential synchronisation algorithm on mobile devices, analyzing real usage data and proposing optimizations to reduce energy use during real-time collaborative editing.

Contribution

It identifies key areas for energy optimization in diffsync and introduces a push-based synchronization strategy to improve energy efficiency on mobile devices.

Findings

Optimizations reduce energy consumption during synchronization.

Push-based diffsync triggers sync only on network connection or change notification.

Real usage data from Mendeley iOS app supports the proposed strategies.

Abstract

Synchronisation algorithms are central to collaborative editing software. As collaboration is increasingly mediated by mobile devices, the energy efficiency for such algorithms is interest to a wide community of application developers. In this paper we explore the differential synchronisation (diffsync) algorithm with respect to energy consumption on mobile devices. Discussions within this paper are based on real usage data of PDF annotations via the Mendeley iOS app, which requires realtime synchronisation. We identify three areas for optimising diffsync: a.) Empty cycles in which no changes need to be processed b.) tail energy by adapting cycle intervals and c.) computational complexity. Following these considerations, we propose a push-based diffsync strategy in which synchronisation cycles are triggered when a device connects to the network or when a device is notified of changes.