Poster: Application-layer optimization of performance vs energy in mobile network I/O

The number of smartphone users globally has already exceeded 2 Billion, and this number is expected to reach 3 Billion by 2020 [2]. It is also estimated that smartphone mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will reach 370 Exabytes per year by that time, exceeding PC Internet traffic the first time in the history [4]. An average smartphone consumes between 300-1200 milliwatts power [1] depending on the type of applications it is running, and most of the energy in smartphone applications is spent for networked I/O. During an active data transfer, the cellular (i.e., GSM) and WiFi components of a smartphone consume more power than its CPU, RAM, and even LCD+graphics card at the highest brightness level [3, 1]. Although the mobile data traffic and the amount of energy spent for it increase at a very fast pace, the battery capacities of smartphones do not increase at the same rate. In this work, we analyze the effects of different application layer data transfer protocol parameters (such as the number of parallel data streams per file, the level of concurrent file transfers, and the I/O request size) on mobile data transfer throughput and energy consumption.