Communication Energy Overhead of Mobiles Games

Although a significant proportion of the mobile apps are games there has been little attention paid to their specific characteristics with respect to communication energy. In this paper we select 20 mobile games among the top 100 free Android games, and study their data patterns and communication energy use over a total of 25 hours of playing. The analysis of the energy for communication over 3G networks indicates that there is a wide variation among the games, the largest footprint being 8 times higher than the lowest one. The results also indicates both app-specific and category-specific relations between data pattern and energy use, as well as variations in CPU utilisation.Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by theauthor/owner(s).