Energy Consumption of 3G Transmissions for Instant Messaging on Mobile Devices

Abstract: A recent surge in the usage of instant messaging (IM) applications on mobile devices has brought the energy efficiency of those applications into the light. We are entering an era where IM applications are changing the message communication on mobile devices, beginning to overtake SMS messages and even phone calls in some cases. Smartphones experience a tremendous increase of data transmissions through wireless interfaces. As illustrated in this work, today's IM applications differ vastly in energy consumption when using the third generation (3G) cellular communication. This thesis focuses on studying the 3G transmission energy footprint of IM applications at the handset level. The energy cost of a common feature used in IM applications that informs that the user is currently typing a response ('typing notify'), is evaluated. The feature is shown to incur a great increase in energy cost compared to the base chat function, ranging from an increase of 43 % to 117 %. The work also proposes a bundle technique that aggregates chat messages over time reducing the energy consumption at the cost of delay for the user. The results show that the bundle technique can save up to 47 % in energy consumption while still keeping the chat function. For the evaluation, conversations collected from a popular IM application are used.