Energy-Efficient Mobile Network IO

By year 2020, the number of smartphone users globally will reach 3 Billion and the mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC Internet traffic the first time. 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 heavily depend on network IO. Despite the growing body of research in power management techniques for mobile devices at the hardware and networking layers, there has been little work focusing on saving energy at the application layer for mobile network IO. In this paper, we show that significant energy savings can be achieved with application-layer solutions at the mobile systems during data transfer with no performance penalty. In many cases, performance increase and energy savings can be achieved simultaneously.