Adapting network interactions of a rescue service mobile application for improved battery life

Abstract: Today, it is not unusual that smartphone devices can’t survive even one day of regular use until the battery needs to be recharged. The batteries are drained while using power hungry applications made by developers who haven’t taken their application’s energy impact into consideration. In this thesis we study network transmissions as made by a mobile application, and the impact these have on the battery life. The application was developed with the local rescue and emergency service as a hypothetical target group. We test how the mobile network technologies 3G and WiFi together with the device’s current signal strength and battery level affect the energy usage of the battery when uploading data to a server. We develop an adaptation mechanism on application level which uses a mathematical model for calculating a suitable adaptation of scheduling of network interactions. The adaptation mechanism makes use of burst buffering of packets, and adjusts for 3G tail times as well as for different priorities of incoming requests. Custom packet scheduling profiles are made to make consistent measurements, and with this implementation we are able to reduce the amount of energy consumed using 3G and WiFi with 67 % and 39 % respectively during tests.