Refining Mobile Web Design for Reducing Energy Consumption of Mobile Terminals

Recent years have seen an increasing demand of web applications on mobile terminals. However, web pages, conventionally designed for PCs with stable power supply and large screen, do not lead to the same user experience when directly running on mobile terminals with limited battery and small screen. There have been some initial efforts on mobile-enabled web design, but the energy consumption of web pages on mobile terminals is seldom taken into account. In this paper, we discuss how to refine mobile web design for reducing energy consumption of web browsing on mobile terminals. First, based on experiments, we analyze energy consumption of different computing resources on each mobile terminal during web page browsing. We reveal that besides CPU, Wi-Fi and display, scrolling operations also lead to a large energy consumption, which, however, is not seriously considered in previous works. Then, based on the fact that web contents have different access popularity, we propose a content rearrangement method: listing contents in the decreasing order of their access popularity so as to reduce the average number of scrolling operations required to reach target contents. The proposed method is evaluated, by both theoretical analysis and experiments on actual web pages. e.g., in a scenario with 100 contents where the top 10 are already in order, applying the proposed method to the rest 90 less popular contents still reduces the energy consumption of web browsing by 26% according to the theoretical analysis.