Lifecycle energy assessment of mobile applications

Abstract

Energy assessment is important to reduce environmental impact of modern IT. This paper analyzes the total energy consumption associated with production, delivery and use of application software for mobile devices and assesses its contribution to green-house gas emissions. The results reveal that as application size grows, the energy consumed at the production stage becomes a dominant factor of the total lifecycle energy. However, as the application becomes largely used, most of the lifecycle energy is consumed at the use stage due to updates. The paper investigates dependency of lifecycle energy on the application size, the number of application copies in use as well as the size of update and shows the trend. A lifecycle energy assessment of Mail K9 application is presented as a case study.