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Revisiting Network Energy Efficiency of Mobile Apps: Performance in the Wild

Published: 28 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Energy consumption due to network traffic on mobile devices continues to be a significant concern. We examine a range of excessive energy consumption problems caused by background network traffic through a two-year user study, and also validate these findings through in-lab testing of the most recent versions of major mobile apps. We discover a new energy consumption problem where foreground network traffic persists after switching from the foreground to the background, leading to unnecessary energy and data drain. Furthermore, while we find some apps have taken steps to improve the energy impact of periodic background traffic, energy consumption differences of up to an order of magnitude exist between apps with near-identical functionality. Finally, by examining how apps are used in the wild, we find that some apps continue to generate unneeded traffic for days when the app is not being used, and in some cases this wasted traffic is responsible for a majority of the app's network energy overhead. We propose that these persistent, widespread and varied sources of excessive energy consumption in popular apps should be addressed through new app management tools that tailor network activity to user interaction patterns.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference
October 2015
550 pages
ISBN:9781450338486
DOI:10.1145/2815675
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 28 October 2015

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Author Tags

  1. 4g lte
  2. cellular network performance
  3. mobile energy consumption
  4. smartphones

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  • Short-paper

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  • NSF

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IMC '15
Sponsor:
IMC '15: Internet Measurement Conference
October 28 - 30, 2015
Tokyo, Japan

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IMC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 96 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Who Should We Blame for Android App Crashes? An In-Depth Study at Scale and Practical ResolutionsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/364989520:3(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Sustainable use of a smartphone and regulatory needsSustainable Development10.1002/sd.299532:6(6182-6200)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Cloning-based virtual machine pre-provisioning for resource-constrained edge cloud serverCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-023-04045-327:2(1831-1847)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Exploiting big.LITTLE Batteries for Software Defined Management on Mobile DevicesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.303523621:6(1998-2012)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2022)AppSPIN: reconfiguration-based responsiveness testing and diagnosing for Android AppsAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-022-00347-929:2Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Device-Type Profiling for Network Access Control Systems using Clustering-Based Multivariate Gaussian Outlier ScoreProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Future Networks and Distributed Systems10.1145/3508072.3508113(270-279)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2021
  • (2021)A variegated look at 5G in the wildProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472923(610-625)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
  • (2021)Toward Efficient Execution of Mainstream Deep Learning Frameworks on Mobile Devices: Architectural ImplicationsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2020.300323340:3(453-466)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2020)Libspector : Context-Aware Large-Scale Network Traffic Analysis of Android Applications2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)10.1109/DSN48063.2020.00048(318-330)Online publication date: Jun-2020
  • (2019)Enabling Out-of-Band Coordination of Wi-Fi Communications on SmartphonesIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.289126327:2(518-531)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
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