research-article

Staying online while mobile: the hidden costs

Authors:

Andrius Aucinas,

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez,

Yan Grunenberger,

Vijay Erramilli,

Konstantina Papagiannaki,

Jon Crowcroft,

David WetherallAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '13: Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

Pages 315 - 320

https://doi.org/10.1145/2535372.2535408

Published: 09 December 2013 Publication History

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Abstract

Mobile phones in the 3G/4G era enable us to stay connected not only to the voice network, but also to online services like social networks. In this paper, we study the energy and network costs of mobile applications that provide continuous online presence (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype). By combining measurements taken on the mobile and the cellular access network, we reveal a detailed picture of the mechanisms selected to implement online presence, along with their effect on handset energy consumption and network signaling traffic.

We are surprised to find that simply having idle online presence apps on a mobile (that maintain connectivity in the background, with no user interaction) can drain the handset battery nine times more quickly. This high cost is partly due to online presence apps that are excessively ``chatty'', in particular when their design philosophy stems from a similar desktop version. However, we also find that the cost of background app traffic is disproportionately large because of cross-layer interactions in which the traffic unintentionally triggers the promotion of cellular network states. Our experiments show that both of these effects can be overcome with careful implementation. We posit that a two-way push notification system, with messages being sent at a low (regular) frequency and low volume by a network-aware sender, can alleviate many of the costs.

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Xia XLi SZhang YLi BZheng YGu T(2019)Enabling Out-of-Band Coordination of Wi-Fi Communications on SmartphonesIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.289126327:2(518-531)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2019.2891263
Li YWang YLan T(2019)Mobile Ad Prefetching and Energy Optimization via Tail Energy AccountingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.287359618:9(2117-2128)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2018.2873596
Jia YZhang YLiang LXu WZhou S(2017)Impact of mobile instant messaging applications on signaling load and UE energy consumptionWireless Networks10.5555/3110564.311059623:5(1645-1654)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3110564.3110596
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Index Terms

Staying online while mobile: the hidden costs
1. Networks
  1. Network services
    1. Network monitoring

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Published In

CoNEXT '13: Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

December 2013

454 pages

ISBN:9781450321013

DOI:10.1145/2535372

General Chairs:
Kevin Almeroth
UC Santa Barbara, USA
,
Laurent Mathy
Université de Liège, Belgium
,
Program Chairs:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Spain
,
Vishal Misra
Columbia University

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 09 December 2013

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CoNEXT '13

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SIGCOMM

CoNEXT '13: Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

December 9 - 12, 2013

California, Santa Barbara, USA

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CoNEXT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 44 of 226 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

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Xia XLi SZhang YLi BZheng YGu T(2019)Enabling Out-of-Band Coordination of Wi-Fi Communications on SmartphonesIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.289126327:2(518-531)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2019.2891263
Li YWang YLan T(2019)Mobile Ad Prefetching and Energy Optimization via Tail Energy AccountingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.287359618:9(2117-2128)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2018.2873596
Jia YZhang YLiang LXu WZhou S(2017)Impact of mobile instant messaging applications on signaling load and UE energy consumptionWireless Networks10.5555/3110564.311059623:5(1645-1654)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3110564.3110596
Razaghpanah ANiaki AVallina-Rodriguez NSundaresan SAmann JGill P(2017)Studying TLS Usage in Android AppsProceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3143361.3143400(350-362)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3143361.3143400
Li ZWang WXu TZhong XLi XLiu YWilson CZhao BArgyraki KIsaacs R(2016)Exploring cross-application cellular traffic optimization with Baidu TrafficGuardProceedings of the 13th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/2930611.2930616(61-76)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2016
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Cho JSundaresan KMahindra RVan der Merwe JRangarajan SMarkopoulou AFaloutsos MSekar VKostic D(2016)ACACIAProceedings of the 12th International on Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/2999572.2999604(375-389)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2016
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Vanerio JCasas PCasas PLeão RPaganini FAlvarez-Hamelin JBustos-Jiménez J(2016)WhatsApp CallingProceedings of the 2016 workshop on Fostering Latin-American Research in Data Communication Networks10.1145/2940116.2940132(13-15)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2016
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RILAnalyzer: a comprehensive 3G monitor on your phone

Demo: PhoneLets: offloading the phone off your phone for energy, cost and network load optimization

A Low Latency Handoff Algorithm for Voice over IP Traffics in the Next Generation Packet-Based Cellular Networks: Cellular Mobile IPv6

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