Optimizing Energy Efficiency of Browsers in Energy-Aware Scheduling-enabled Mobile Devices

Abstract

Web browsing, previously optimized for the desktop environment, is being fine-tuned for energy-efficient use on mobile devices. Although active attempts have been made to reduce energy consumption, the advent of energy-aware scheduling (EAS) integrated in the recent devices suggests the possibility of a new approach for optimizing energy use by browsers. Our preliminary analysis showed that the existing EAS-enabled system is overly optimized for performance, leading to energy inefficiencies while a web browser is running. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of web browsers, and investigate the cause of energy inefficiency in EAS-enabled mobile devices. We then propose a system, called WebTune, to improve the energy efficiency of mobile browsers. Exploiting the reinforcement learning technique, WebTune learns the optimal execution speed of the web browser's processes, and adjusts the speed at runtime, thus saving energy and ensuring the quality of service (QoS). WebTune is implemented on the latest Android-based smartphones, and evaluated with Alexa's top 200 websites. The experimental results show that WebTune reduced the device-level energy consumption of the Google Pixel 2 XL and Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus smartphones by 18.7-22.0% and 13.7-16.1%, respectively, without degrading the QoS.