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Energy consumption in mobile phones: A measurement study and implications for network applications

  • University of Massachusetts

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

902 Scopus citations

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 while meeting user-specified deadlines. We show that the TailEnder scheduling algorithm is within a factor 2× of the optimal and show that any online algorithm can at best be within a factor 1.62× 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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIMC 2009 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference
Pages280-293
Number of pages14
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event2009 9th ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2009 - Chicago, IL, United States
Duration: Nov 4 2009Nov 6 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC

Conference

Conference2009 9th ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago, IL
Period11/4/0911/6/09

Keywords

  • Cellular networks
  • Energy savings
  • Mobile applications
  • Power measurement
  • WiFi

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