Assessment of TCP Parameters for Mobile Devices Concerning Performance and Energy Consumption

Mobile devices have become quite popular, and they are responsible for a significant part of Internet traffic. In these devices, multimedia services, such as video streaming over HTTP, are commonly adopted, and TCP protocol is the standard to assure reliable data transmission. To deal with applications that require higher bandwidth, several modifications were made on TCP, and they are called extensions for high performance. For instance, these extensions allow a better utilization of network bandwidth offered by high-speed network technologies, such as WCDMA (3G) and LTE (4G). Changes in network technologies and TCP parameters may solve performance issues, but this modification may increase energy consumption (which considerably impacts mobile devices). This paper presents a performance and energy consumption evaluation of network technology and TCP/IP parameters for mobile devices. We utilize video streaming over HTTP as the workload, and results indicate some TCP parameters may influence energy consumption as well as performance.