Client-Side Energy Efficiency of HTTP/2 for Web and Mobile App Developers

Abstract

Recent technological advancements have enabled mobile devices to provide mobile users with substantial capability and accessibility. Energy is evidently one of the most critical resources for such devices, in spite of the substantial gain in popularity of mobile devices, such as smart phones, their utility is severely constrained by the bounded battery capacity. Mobile users are very interested in accessing the Internet although it is one of the most expensive operations in terms of energy and cost. HTTP/2 has been proposed and accepted as the new standard for supporting the World Wide Web. HTTP/2 is expected to offer better performance, such as reduced page load time. Consequently, from the mobile users point of view, the question arises:does HTTP/2 offer improved energy consumption performance achieving longer battery life?In this paper, we compare the energy consumption of HTTP/2 with its predecessor (i.e., HTTP/1.1) using a variety of realworld and synthetic test scenarios. We also investigate how Transport Layer Security (TLS) impacts the energy consumption of the mobile devices. Our study suggests that Round Trip Time (RTT) is one of the biggest factors in deciding how advantageous HTTP/2 is compared to HTTP/1.1. We conclude that for networks with higher RTTs, HTTP/2 has better energy consumption performance than HTTP/1.1.