Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption
Authors: N. Thiagarajan, G. Aggarwal, A. Nicoara, D. Boneh, and J. Singh
Abstract:
Despite the growing popularity of mobile web browsing, the energy
consumed by a phone browser while surfing the web is poorly
understood. We present an infrastructure for measuring the precise
energy used by a mobile browser to render web pages. We then measure
the energy needed to render financial, e-commerce, email, blogging,
news and social networking sites. Our tools are sufficiently precise
to measure the
energy needed to render individual web elements, such as cascade
style sheets (CSS), Javascript, images, and plug-in objects. Our
results show that for popular sites, downloading and parsing cascade
style sheets and Javascript consumes a significant fraction of the
total energy needed to render the page. Using the data we collected we
make concrete recommendations on how to design web pages so as to
minimize the energy needed to render the page. As an example, by
modifying scripts on the Wikipedia mobile site we reduced by 30%
the energy needed to download and render Wikipedia pages
with no change to the user experience. We conclude by estimating the
point at which offloading browser computations to a remote proxy can
save energy on the phone.
Reference:
In Proceedings of the 21st International World Wide Web conference (WWW), 2012, ACM Press, pp. 41-50.
Full paper: pdf [first posted 7/2012 ]