Impact of video quality and wireless network interface on power consumption of mobile devices
This work addresses power management challenges for mobile device users and developers, providing concrete data to inform adaptive systems, though it is incremental in building understanding of specific factors.
The paper analyzes how video quality and wireless network type affect energy consumption on mobile devices, finding that playing a movie over WiFi increases power consumption by up to 38% compared to internal memory, and by up to 64% over 3G networks, with higher quality also significantly impacting CPU and WiFi unit power usage.
During the last years, many improvements were made to the hardware capability of mobile devices. As mobile software also became more interactive and data processing intensive, the increased power demand could not be compensated by the improvements on battery technology. Adaptive systems can help to balance the demand of applications with the limitations of battery resources. For effective systems, the influence of multimedia quality on power consumption of the components of mobile devices needs to be better understood. In this paper, we analyze the impact of video quality and wireless network type on the energy consumption of a mobile device. We have found that the additional power consumption is up to 38% higher when a movie is played over a WiFi network instead from internal memory and 64% higher in case of a mobile network (3G). We have also discovered that a higher movie quality not only affects the power consumption of the CPU but also the power consumption of the WiFi unit by up to 58% and up to 72% respectively on mobile networks.