Power consumption aware software architecture for M-health applications with adaptive security of network protocols

The goal of this paper is development of software architecture for mobile devices, which is able to trade-off between security levels and power consumption. The analysis of the influence of different security protocols on power consumption is given. The proposed architecture is described in detail. Three different security levels with corresponding cipher suites are proposed: low, medium and high. The architecture is implemented on Android platform. The difference in power consumptions of the cipher suites in high and low security/power profiles is around 8.2% for WiFi, and 9.6% for 3G network. In order to further reduce the power consumption during network communication, the delay between sending two successive packets is analyzed. The proposed architecture is capable of stalling packets and sending them in burst-mode, letting the network interface to stay in low-power mode for a longer period of time. The power consumption in this mode is reduced for additional 25%.