How much energy can we save from prefetching ads?: energy drain analysis of top 100 apps

Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge of interests on developing techniques and architectures for prefetching ads to potentially reduce the smartphone energy drain by 3G/4G radios from fetching ads. Despite the development of prefetching techniques, it remains unclear (1) how much smartphone energy do ads consume in popular apps in dominant app markets, and (2) out of which, what portion can we realistically save from prefetching? We present a measurement study of the energy drain of top 100 free apps in Google Play, totaling more than 2.2 B downloads, to re-examine the above two motivational questions for ads energy research. We found the upper bound energy savings from prefetching ads is low: out of the top 100 apps, only 57 apps display ads, which incur on average 3.2% total energy on ads 3G tails. We further show the already-low upper bound ads energy saving is hard to achieve by ads prefetching as different apps exhibit very different ads behavior.