Saving energy on smartphones through edge computing: an experimental evaluation

Edge computing is a network architecture in which computing and storage capabilities are moved at the fringes of the Internet, close to the end-users. The main goal of edge computing is to enable responsive services, thanks to much shorter paths compared to the ones encountered when communicating with remotely positioned cloud servers. In this paper, we report experimental results concerning an overlooked benefit of edge computing: energy is saved on client devices. We carried out an experimental evaluation using both software-based and hardware-based energy estimation methods. Results show that, for HTTP-based communication, the lifetime of a device can be extended significantly when using the edge instead of a remote cloud.