On the Performance of Web Services and Google Cloud Messaging

Abstract

Smartphones and other connected devices rely on data services, such as web services (WS) and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM), to share the information they collect or use. Traditionally, these services were classified according to their efficiency or their delivery time, but, when dealing with battery operated devices, another important parameter is the power consumption. In this paper, we present the results from a test on GCM and two types of WS, namely SOAP-based and RESTful WS. In these tests, we experimentally collected time, efficiency, and power consumption figures for all services. The final outcome is that RESTful WS outperforms all other communication techniques in terms of one-way delay, round trip time, data consumption, packet overhead and battery duration.