10.1145/2187836.2187843acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswwwConference Proceedings
research-article

Who killed my battery?: analyzing mobile browser energy consumption

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing popularity of mobile web browsing, the energy consumed by a phone browser while surfing the web is poorly understood. We present an infrastructure for measuring the precise energy used by a mobile browser to render web pages. We then measure the energy needed to render financial, e-commerce, email, blogging, news and social networking sites. Our tools are sufficiently precise to measure the energy needed to render individual web elements, such as cascade style sheets (CSS), Javascript, images, and plug-in objects. Our results show that for popular sites, downloading and parsing cascade style sheets and Javascript consumes a significant fraction of the total energy needed to render the page. Using the data we collected we make concrete recommendations on how to design web pages so as to minimize the energy needed to render the page. As an example, by modifying scripts on the Wikipedia mobile site we reduced by 30% the energy needed to download and render Wikipedia pages with no change to the user experience. We conclude by estimating the point at which offloading browser computations to a remote proxy can save energy on the phone.

References

  1. Agilent 34410A Digital Multimeter. http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent/product.jspx?pn=34410A.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Android Developer Phone 2 (ADP2). http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Android Developers - Activity. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Android Developers - Intents. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. NetMarketShare. http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=61&sample=37.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. SkyFire. http://skyfire.com.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. The Opera browser. http://opera.com.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. WebKit. http://webkit.org.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. A. Rahmati, C. Shepard, A. Nicoara, L. Zhong, J. Singh. Mobile TCP Usage Characteristics and the Feasibility of Network Migration without Infrastructure Support. In Proc. of ACM 16th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'10), Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. A. Rahmati, L. Zhong. Context-for-Wireless: Context-Sensitive Energy-Efficient Wireless Data Transfer. In Proc. of ACM 5th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'07), Puerto Rico, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. A. Schulman, V. Navda, R. Ramjee, N. Spring, P. Deshpande, C. Grunewald, K. Jain, V. N. Padmanabhan. Bartendr: A Practical Approach to Energy-aware Cellular Data Scheduling. In Proc. of ACM 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'10), Chicago, USA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Byung-Gon Chun, Petros Maniatis. Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution. In Proc. of the 12th Conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. E. Cuervoy, A. Balasubramanian, D-k. Cho, A. Wolman, S. Saroiu, R. Chandra, P. Bahl. MAUI: Making Smartphones Last Longer with Code Offload. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'10), San Francisco, USA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. G. C. Hunt, M. L. Scott. The Coign Automatic Distributed Partitioning System. In Proc. of the 3rd Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'99), Louisiana, 1999. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. J. Flinn, D. Narayanan, M. Satyanarayanan. Self-Tuned Remote Execution for Pervasive Computing. In Proc. of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), Germany, 2001. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. J. Flinn, S. Park, M. Satyanarayanan. Balancing Performance, Energy, and Quality in Pervasive Computing. In Proc. of the 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'02), Vienna, Austria, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. J. Huang, Q. Xu, B. Tiwana, A. Wolman, Z. M. Mao, M. Zhang, P. Bahl. Anatomizing Application Performance Differences on Smartphones. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'10), San Francisco, USA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. N. Balasubramanian, A. Balasubramanian, A. Venkataramani. Energy Consumption in Mobile Phones: A Measurement Study and Implications for Network Applications. In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'09), Chicago, USA, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. S. Nirjon, A. Nicoara, C. Hsu, J. Singh, J. Stankovic. MultiNets: Policy Oriented Real-Time Switching of Wireless Interfaces on Mobile Devices. In Proc. of 18th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS'12), China, 2012. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. S. Osman, D. Subhraveti, G. Su, J. Nieh. The Design and Implementation of Zap. In Proc. of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'02), Boston, USA, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. U. Kremer, J. Hicks, J. M. Rehg. Compiler-Directed Remote Task Execution for Power Management. In Proc. of The Workshop on Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power (COLP), 2000.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Y. Weinsberg, D. Dolev, T. Anker, M. Ben-Yehuda, P. Wyckoff. Tapping into the Fountain of CPUs - On Operating System Support for Programmable Devices. In Proc. of the 13th International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'08), Seattle, WA, USA, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Z. Zhuang, K. Kim, J. Singh. Improving Energy Efficiency of Location Sensing on Smartphones. In Proc. of ACM 8th Intl. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'10), San Francisco, USA, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Who killed my battery?

          Comments

          Login options

          Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

          Sign in

          PDF Format

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader
          About Cookies On This Site

          We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

          Learn more

          Got it!