Energy consumption in mobile phones

TLDR

The study measures energy use of 3G, GSM, and Wi‑Fi and proposes a model and TailEnder protocol to reduce mobile application energy consumption. Using the measurements, the authors build a per‑technology energy model and design TailEnder, which schedules or prefetches transfers to meet deadlines while minimizing cumulative energy. TailEnder cuts energy use by up to 60 % for news feeds and 50 % for web queries, achieves within 2× the optimal schedule, and shows that 3G/GSM incur high tail‑state energy overhead.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a measurement study of the energy consumption characteristics of three widespread mobile networking technologies: 3G, GSM, and WiFi. We find that 3G and GSM incur a high tail energy overhead because of lingering in high power states after completing a transfer. Based on these measurements, we develop a model for the energy consumed by network activity for each technology.Using this model, we develop TailEnder, a protocol that reduces energy consumption of common mobile applications. For applications that can tolerate a small delay such as e-mail, TailEnder schedules transfers so as to minimize the cumulative energy consumed meeting user-specified deadlines. We show that the TailEnder scheduling algorithm is within a factor 2x of the optimal and show that any online algorithm can at best be within a factor 1.62x of the optimal. For applications like web search that can benefit from prefetching, TailEnder aggressively prefetches several times more data and improves user-specified response times while consuming less energy. We evaluate the benefits of TailEnder for three different case study applications - email, news feeds, and web search - based on real user logs and show significant reduction in energy consumption in each case. Experiments conducted on the mobile phone show that TailEnder can download 60% more news feed updates and download search results for more than 50% of web queries, compared to using the default policy.