Performance comparison of power saving strategies for mobile Web access

One of the critical issues in mobile Web access is the usage of limited energy resources of mobile computers. Unfortunately, the legacy TCP/IP architecture is very inefficient. This work proposes and analyzes power-saving strategies for mobile Web access. Specifically, in this paper we develop an energy-consumption model for Web transactions and, based on it, we propose and compare four different energy saving strategies: ideal, Indirect-TCP (I-TCP), local and global. The ideal strategy is unfeasible but it is used as a reference bound as it guarantees the lowest energy consumption. The other strategies have been implemented and compared in a real test-bed. The performance comparison is carried out by measuring two main performance figures: the energy spent for downloading a Web page, and the associated transfer-time. Experimental results show that relevant energy saving is achievable and that, among the feasible strategies, the global one gives the best performance: with this strategy we can save (on average) up to 88% of the energy. Furthermore, our results indicate that this power saving is obtained without a significant increase in the transfer-time perceived by the users (on average, 0.2s). Finally, by comparing the feasible strategies, we observe that the global one is much closer to the ideal case than the other strategies. In detail, the global strategy is about twice more efficient than the local one, and eight times more efficient than the I-TCP strategy