Energy-Performance Trade-offs in Mobile Data Transfers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how application layer data transfer protocols impact mobile phone energy consumption and demonstrates that significant energy savings are possible without compromising performance.

Contribution

It provides the first in-depth analysis of application layer protocol parameters on mobile energy use, revealing opportunities for energy-efficient data transfer.

Findings

Application layer parameters significantly affect energy consumption.

Energy savings of up to 50% are achievable during data transfer.

Performance can be maintained or improved while reducing energy use.

Abstract

By year 2020, the number of smartphone users globally will reach 3 Billion and the mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC internet traffic the first time. As the number of smartphone users and the amount of data transferred per smartphone grow exponentially, limited battery power is becoming an increasingly critical problem for mobile devices which increasingly depend on network I/O. Despite the growing body of research in power management techniques for the mobile devices at the hardware layer as well as the lower layers of the networking stack, there has been little work focusing on saving energy at the application layer for the mobile systems during network I/O. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we are first to provide an in depth analysis of the effects of application layer data transfer protocol parameters on the energy consumption of mobile phones. We show that significant energy savings can be achieved with application layer solutions at the mobile systems during data transfer with no or minimal performance penalty. In many cases, performance increase and energy savings can be achieved simultaneously.