Improving battery life for wireless web services through the use of a mobile proxy

Cell phone battery life has been a fundamental design consideration ever since the first mobile devices were introduced in the 1970´s. When mobile services were restricted to voice, the problem from a system design perspective often boiled down to finding best of breed components (e.g. amplifiers, signal processors, etc.) that optimized power while not sacrificing size. However, today´s cell phones support a wide array of services beyond voice telephony, and battery life optimization is now being considered with respect to each of this multitude of services. Optimizing battery life for internet usage is a less constrained problem than optimization for voice telephony or audio and video playback. For starters, it is difficult to optimize the hardware in a mobile phone for a specific internet service given that there are many different types of services available over the internet (email, web, etc.). Nevertheless, almost all popular internet services that do not require a guaranteed level of quality-of-service (e.g. VoIP) can be delivered as web services wireless settings. As a result, power optimization in web transport mechanisms is an attractive area of focus for internet power optimization. In this work, the use of a mobile web proxy is considered as a means of increasing handset battery life for mobile web browsing. By leveraging observed user interaction with web content, the proxy can be designed to improve power consumption without sacrificing user experience.