Performance and Energy Consumption of Lossless Compression/Decompression Utilities on Mobile Computing Platforms

Abstract—Data compression and decompression utilities can be critical in increasing communication throughput, reducing communication latencies, achieving energy-efficient communi-cation, and making effective use of available storage. This paper experimentally evaluates several such utilities for mul-tiple compression levels on systems that represent current mobile platforms. We characterize each utility in terms of its compression ratio, compression and decompression through-put, and energy efficiency. We consider different use cases that are typical for modern mobile environments. We find a wide variety of energy costs associated with data compression and decompression and provide practical guidelines for selecting the most energy efficient configurations for each use case. The best performing configurations provide 6-fold and 4-fold im-provements in energy efficiency for compressed uploads and downloads over WLAN, respectively, when compared to un-compressed data transfers. Keywords—mobile computing; measurement techniques; da-ta compression; energy-aware systems I