Poster: VPN Tunnels for Energy Efficient Multimedia Streaming

Minimizing the energy consumption of mobile devices for wireless network access is important. In this article, we analyze the energy efficiency of a new set of applications which use Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels for secure communication. First, we discuss the energy efficiency of a number of VPN applications from a large scale deployment of 500 K devices. We next measure the energy consumption of some of these applications with different use cases. Finally, we demonstrate that a VPN tunnel can be instrumented for enhanced energy efficiency with multimedia streaming applications. Our results indicate energy savings of 40% for this class of applications.