Energy-Efficient Mobile Network I/O Optimization at the Application Layer

Abstract: Mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC Internet traffic by 2020. 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 depend on the 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 propose a novel model, called FastHLA, that can achieve significant energy savings at the application layer during mobile network I/O without sacrificing the performance. In many cases, our model achieves performance increase and energy saving simultaneously.