NetMaster: Taming Energy Devourers on Smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones nowadays are installed with diverse applications, each of which consumes energy and bandwidth. As more and more applications are crowded into a smart- phone, they cause serious problems with regard to battery life and bandwidth utilization. Existing proposals to tackle such challenges usually resort to two ways: avoiding energy- consuming network activities or improving communication efficiency in terms of power consumption. Those approaches either affect the smartphone users' experience, or offer little benefit in prolonging the battery life. Motivated by insightful understanding of users' habit, we in this paper propose a novel approach to orchestrate network activities of smartphone applications, based on user's habit. We implement our approach on smartphones as a middleware service called NetMaster. The performance evaluation with real traces shows that NetMaster reduces energy consumption of network activities by 77.8% in average and increases network bandwidth utilization by over 200%. The user experience is surprisingly well preserved. The chance of undesired interrupt during normal usage is less than 1%.