Evaluating Energy Saving Techniques for Network Requests in Mobile Applications

Abstract: Climate change is one of the most pressing issues today and companies are looking for ways to lower their carbon emissions. Software companies that develop mobile applications have a carbon footprint through several sources. The application uses networking which consumes energy through data transmission across the internet and data centers. The app consumes energy from the device's battery, which needs to be recharged with part carbon electricity. In this thesis, a literature study was initially conducted in order to investigate and gain knowledge about the different sources of energy consumption associated with a mobile application. An energy savings technique for networking in apps called batching was then tested on a real device. Additionally, different periodic intervals of sending network requests were tested and evaluated in terms of energy consumption. An iOS experiment app was built and run on an iPhone 7. The tests in the app was performed on both WiFi and 4G. The iPhone was altered and connected to a power monitor that was able to sample the energy consumption of the device with high accuracy. The results showed that sending 1000 HTTP GET requests periodically over 5 minutes, consumed 130\% more energy than batching them. On 4G the periodic requests consumed 250\% more energy than batching. The results from testing the request intervals showed that the energy consumption per request was higher for the test with larger intervals.